


The Blind Psychic

by Deimos_Ovid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent Friendship, Adam Parrish Loves Ronan Lynch, Blind Blue Sargent, Blue Sargent-centric, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 55,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24196603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deimos_Ovid/pseuds/Deimos_Ovid
Summary: It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—or anything for that matter. She has been blind since birth. Blue’s inherited clairvoyance allows her to see the ley lines Henrietta, Virginia. Blue has never seen the soon-to-be dead—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.-Blue Sargent is a blind psychic that can see via Ley Lines. The Raven Boys and her team up and try to find Cabeswater. Blue is a powerful psychic and not a weak one like in the book.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.

Her family traded in predictions. These predictions tended, however, to run toward the nonspecific. Things like: Something terrible will happen to you today. It might involve the number six. Or: Money is coming. Open your hand for it. Or: You have a big decision and it will not make itself. Or: Maura your baby will be different. Prepare for the worst.

The people who came to the little, bright blue house at 300 Fox Way didn’t mind the imprecise nature of their fortunes. It became a game, a challenge, to realize the exact moment that the predictions came true. When a van carrying six people wheeled into a client’s car two hours after his psychic reading, he could nod with a sense of accomplishment and release. When a neighbor offered to buy another client’s old lawn mower if she was looking for a bit of extra cash, she could recall the promise of money coming and sell it with the sense that the transaction had been foretold. Or when a baby girl is born blind, Maura, Calla, and Persephone were prepared by Maura Sargent over a spread of tarot cards and then leap decisively to action.

But the imprecise nature of the fortunes stole some of their power. The predictions could be dismissed as coincidences, hunches. They were a chuckle in the Walmart parking lot when you ran into an old friend as promised. A shiver when the number seventeen appeared on an electric bill. A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn’t change how you lived in the present. They were truth, but they weren’t all of the truth.

"I should tell you," Maura always advised her new clients, "that this reading will be accurate, but not specific."

It was easier that way.

But this was not what Blue was told. Again and again, she had her fingers spread wide, her palm examined, her cards plucked from velvet-edged decks and spread across the fuzz of a family friend’s living room carpet. Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone’s eyebrows. Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized, and séances conducted.

All the women came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific. What they all agreed on, in many different clairvoyant languages, was this:

If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die.

For a long time, this bothered Blue. The warning was specific, certainly, but in the way of a fairy tale. It didn’t say how her true love would die. It didn’t say how long after the kiss he would survive. Did it have to be a kiss on the lips? Would a chaste peck on the back of his palm prove as deadly?

Until she was eleven, Blue was convinced she would silently contract an infectious disease. One press of her lips to her hypothetical soulmate and he, too, would die in a consumptive battle untreatable by modern medicine.

When she turned fifteen, Blue desperately wanted to conclude that her mother’s tarot cards were just a pack of playing cards and that the dreams of her mother and the other clairvoyant women were fueled by mixed drinks rather than otherworldly insight, and so the prediction didn’t matter.

She knew better, though. The predictions that came out of 300 Fox Way were unspecific, but undeniably true. Her mother had dreamt Blue’s broken wrist on the first day of school. Her aunt Jimi predicted Maura’s tax return to within ten dollars. Blue could _see_ , which for a girl born blind proved the existence of otherworldly sight.

No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill her true love with a kiss. It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it had lost its force. Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be imaginary.

And by sixteen, Blue had decided she would never fall in love, so it didn’t matter. Who would want to date a blind girl anyway? Blue would never fall in love, therefore, the looming curse she had did not matter.

But that belief changed when her mother’s half-sister Neeve came to their little town of Henrietta. Neeve had gotten famous for doing loudly what Blue’s mother and her did quietly. Maura’s readings were done in her front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it. Neeve, on the other hand, did her readings on television at five o’clock in the morning. She had a website featuring old soft-focus photographs of her staring unerringly at the viewer. Four books on the supernatural bore her name on the cover.

Blue had never met Neeve, so she knew more about her half aunt from a cursory web search than from personal experience. Blue wasn’t sure why Neeve was coming to visit, but she knew her imminent arrival spurred a legion of whispered conversations between Maura and her two best friends, Persephone and Calla — the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room. But Blue wasn’t particularly concerned about Neeve’s arrival; what was one more woman in a house filled to the brim with them?

Neeve finally appeared on a spring evening when the already long shadows of the mountains to the west seemed even longer than usual. When Blue heard the door being opened for her, she thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfamiliar old woman, but then her eyes focused on the aura emanating from Neeve, a psychic indeed. Her aura had the distinct _blue_ color which was reserved for those more supernaturally inclined. If she were a normal human she would have a dull _orange_ color.

Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying. Blue was familiar enough with their voices; each fall, the Aglionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend. Blue knew what their frantic howls meant at that moment: They were on the chase.

"You’re Maura’s daughter," Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, she added, "this is the year you’ll fall in love."

_Shit._


	2. Chapter 2

It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived.

Every year, Blue and her mother, Maura, had come to the same place, and every year it was chilly. But this year, without Maura here with her, it felt colder.

It was April 24, St. Mark’s Eve. For most people, St. Mark’s Day came and went without note. It wasn’t a school holiday. No presents were exchanged. There were no costumes or festivals. There were no St. Mark’s Day sales, no St. Mark’s Day cards in the store racks, no special television programs that aired only once a year. No one marked April 25 on their calendar. In fact, most of the living were unaware that St. Mark even had a day named in his honor.

But the dead remembered.

As Blue sat shivering on the stone wall with her can resting against her, she reasoned that at least, at the very least, it wasn’t raining this year.

Every St. Mark’s Eve, this was where Maura and Blue drove: an isolated church so old that its name had been forgotten. Maura described the ruin as cupped in the densely wooded hills outside of Henrietta, still several miles from the mountains proper. Only the exterior walls remained; the roof and floors had long ago collapsed inside. Maura always kept Blue far from it in case her _vision_ failed her. What hadn’t rotted away was hidden under hungry vines and rancid-smelling saplings. The church was surrounded by a stone wall, broken only by a lych-gate just large enough for a coffin and its bearers. A stubborn path that seemed impervious to weeds led through to the old church door.

"Ah," Neeve murmured. "Tonight is a night."

She said it like this: "Tonight is a night," and when she did, Blue felt her skin creep a little. Blue had sat watch with her mother for the past ten St. Mark’s Eves, but tonight felt different.

Tonight was a night.

This year, for the first time, and for reasons Blue didn’t understand, Maura sent Neeve to do the church watch in her place. Her mother had asked Blue if she would go along as usual, but it wasn’t really a question. Blue had always gone; she would go this time. It was not as if she had made plans for St. Mark’s Eve. But she had to be asked. Maura had decided sometime before Blue’s birth that it was barbaric to order children about, and so Blue had grown up surrounded by imperative question marks.

Blue opened and closed her chilly fists. Blue could fell the top edges of her fingerless gloves were fraying, but they had a certain trashy chic to them. If she could see, Blue could’ve worn the boring but functional gloves she’d been given for Christmas; being able to see where she put them. But she couldn’t, so instead she had her fraying fingerless gloves, infinitely cooler though also colder, and besides she liked the thought of being a trashy chic. And no one to see them but Neeve and the dead so it didn’t matter.

April days in Henrietta were quite often fair, tender things, coaxing sleeping trees to bud and love-mad ladybugs to beat against windowpanes. But not tonight. It felt like winter.

Blue asked for the time. A few minutes until eleven. The old legends recommended the church watch be kept at midnight, but the dead kept poor time, especially when there wasn’t a moon.

Unlike Blue, who didn’t tend toward patience, Neeve was a regal statue on the old church wall: hands folded, ankles crossed beneath a long wool skirt. Blue, huddled, shorter and thinner, was a restless, sightless gargoyle. It was a night for seers and psychics, witches and mediums.

In other words, it was a night for her unordinary eyes.

Out of the silence, Neeve asked, "Do you hear anything?" Her eyes glittered in the black.

"No," Blue answered, because she didn’t. Then she wondered if Neeve had asked because Neeve did.

Blue could feel Neeve looking at her with a deliberately unnerving, otherworldly stare that lasted several more seconds than was comfortable. A few days after Neeve had arrived, Blue had been distressed enough to mention it to Maura. They had both been crammed into the single bathroom, Blue getting ready for school with her mother’s help, and Maura for work.

Blue, feeling Maura trying to clip all of the various bits of her dark hair back into a vestigial ponytail, had asked, "Does she have to stare like that?"

Maura had laughed, Blue had taken to drawing three intersecting lines on her thigh unconsciously. "Oh, that’s just Neeve’s trademark." Was all Maura said on the matter.

Blue thought there were probably better things to be known for.

In the churchyard, Neeve said enigmatically, "There is a lot to hear."

The thing was, it was true. In the summer, the foothills were alive with insects buzzing, mockingbirds whistling back and forth, ravens yelling at cars. But it was too cool, tonight, for anything to be awake yet.

"I do hear things like that," Blue said, a little surprised Neeve wasn’t already aware. In Blue’s intensely clairvoyant family, she was gifted, able to join the vibrant conversation her mother and aunts and cousins held with a world hidden to most people. "I hear as much of the conversation as everyone else. I can’t _see_ the newly departed, though. I’m told, however, that I amplify it for everyone else."

"So that’s why Maura was so eager for you to come along. Does she have you at all her readings as well?"

Blue shuddered at the thought. A fair number of the clients who entered 300 Fox Way were miserable women hoping Maura would see love and money in their future. The idea of being trapped in the house with that all day was exhausting. Blue knew it had to be very tempting for her mother to have Blue present, making her psychic powers stronger. When she was younger, she’d never appreciated how little Maura called on her to join in a reading, but now that Blue understood how well she honed other people’s talents, she was impressed at Maura’s restraint. Most of the time, Blue sat in the room with headphones on and listened to her favorite audiobooks. Sometimes, Maura would ask Blue to take on the client, but those were very few and far between.

"Not unless it’s a very important one," she replied.

Neeve said, "It’s something to be proud of, you know. To make someone else’s psychic gift stronger is a rare and valuable thing. Not to mention to be gifted as well despite your blindness."

"Oh, pshaw," Blue said, but not cruelly. She meant to be funny. She’d had sixteen years to get used to the idea that she was privy to the supernatural. She didn’t want Neeve to think she was experiencing an identity crisis over it. She tugged a string on her glove.

"And you have plenty of time to grow into your own intuitive talents," Neeve added. Her gaze seemed hungry.

Blue didn’t reply. She wasn’t really interested in telling other people’s futures like her mother. She was interested in going out and finding her own.

Neeve finally dropped her eyes. Blue had taken to tracing an idle finger through the dirt on the stones between them, three intersecting lines. Neeve said, "I passed by a school on the way into town. Aglionby Academy. Is that where you go?"

Blue smiled at this. But of course Neeve, an outsider, couldn’t know. Still, surely she could have guessed from the massive stone great hall and the parking lot full of cars that spoke German that it wasn’t the sort of school that they could afford. Blue’s friends described the school that way at least.

"It’s an all-boys school. For politicians’ sons and oil barons’ sons and for"—Blue struggled the think of who else might be rich enough to send their kids to Aglionby—"the sons of mistresses living off hush money."

Neeve let out a miffed sound.

"No, really, they’re awful," Blue said. April was a bad time for the Aglionby boys; as it warmed up, Blue’s friends had a field day describing the convertibles that appeared, bearing boys in shorts so tacky that only the rich would dare to wear them. During the school week, they all wore the Aglionby uniform: khaki pants and a V-neck sweater with a raven emblem. It was an easy way to identify the advancing army. Raven boys. Or so Blue was told.

Blue continued. "They think they’re better than us and that we’re all falling all over ourselves for them, and they drink themselves senseless every weekend and spray paint the Henrietta exit sign. My friends told me so."

Aglionby Academy was the number one reason Blue had developed her two rules: One, stay away from boys, because they were trouble. And two, stay away from Aglionby boys, because they were bastards.

"You seem like a very sensible teen," Neeve said, which annoyed Blue, because she already knew she was a very sensible teen. When you had as little money as the Sargents did, sensibility in all matters was ingrained young.

In the ambient light from the nearly full moon, Neeve caught sight of what Blue had drawn in the dirt. She asked, "What is that? Maura drew that."

"Did she?" Blue asked. Neeve studied the pattern. It was three curving, intersecting lines, making a long sort of triangle. "Did she say anything about what it was?"

"She was drawing it on the shower door. I didn’t ask." Neeve said, "I dreamt it. Did you as well?"

“It’s just been on my mind. I do it absent mindedly.” Blue smeared the dirt to erase her drawing. She then said, "I think they’re coming."

This was why Blue and Neeve were here. Every year, Maura sat on the wall, knees pulled up to her chin, staring at nothing, and recited names to Blue. To Blue and to Maura, the churchyard was full of the dead. Not the currently dead, but the spirits of those who would die in the next twelve months. For Blue, it had always been like hearing one half of a conversation. She could barely see their _auras_ , but she could hear them. Sometimes her mother would recognize the spirits, but often she would have to lean forward to ask them their names. Maura had once explained that if Blue wasn’t there, she couldn’t convince them to answer her—the dead couldn’t see Maura without Blue’s presence ironically enough.

Blue never grew tired of feeling particularly needed, but sometimes she wished needed felt less like a synonym for useful.


	3. Chapter 3

The church watch was critical for one of Maura’s most unusual services. So long as clients lived in the area, she guaranteed to let them know if they or a local loved one was bound to die in the next twelve months. Who wouldn’t pay for that? Well, the true answer was: most of the world, as most people didn’t believe in psychics.

"Can you see anything?" Blue asked. She gave her numb hands a bracing rub before hearing Neeve snatching up a notebook and pen from the wall.

Neeve was very still.

Again, a shiver thrilled up Blue’s arms. " Something just touched my hair. Was it one of them?"

In a husky voice, Neeve said, "The future dead have to follow the corpse road through the gate. This is probably another … spirit called by your energy. I didn’t realize what an effect you would have."

Maura had never mentioned other dead people being attracted by Blue. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to scare her. Or maybe Maura just hadn’t seen them — maybe she was as blind to these other spirits as Blue was. The _auras_ of the soon-to-be dead were incredibly difficult to detect. They didn’t really have a _color_ to them like humans and other living creatures, but Blue can _sense_ them. Blue could _sense_ the dead the same way one could sense someone other.

Blue became uncomfortably aware of the slightest breeze touching her face, it lifted Neeve’s curly hair. Invisible, orderly spirits of not yet truly dead people were one thing. Ghosts that weren’t compelled to stay on the path were another.

"Are they —" Blue started.

"Who are you? Robert Neuhmann," Neeve interrupted. "What’s your name? Ruth Vert. What’s your name? Frances Powell."

Blue listened to all of the dead’s replies to Neeve’s questions. She heard the psychic scratching quickly to catch up, likely printing them phonetically as Neeve solicited them. The younger of the two once again resumed absentmindedly drawing the three intersecting lines.

With only hearing the whispers of the dead but _seeing_ no one it left Blue feeling unsettled.

Some days it did seem a little unfair that all of the wonder and power that surrounded her family was passed to Blue in the form of sightlessness.

At least I can still be a part of it, Blue thought grimly, although she felt about as included as a _seeing eye dog_. Blue recounted the names she heard: Dorothy, Ralph, Clarence, Esther, Herbert, Melvin. A lot of the same last names, too. The valley was dominated by several old families that were large if not powerful.

Somewhere outside of Blue’s thoughts, Neeve’s tone became more emphatic.

"What’s your name?" she asked. "Excuse me. What is your name?"

Blue lifted her head at Neeve’s slightly irritated tone.

And she _saw_ someone. Their _aura_ was a faint orange.

Blue’s heart hammered like a fist to her breastbone. On the other side of the heartbeat, he was still there. Where there should have been nothing, there was a person.

"I _see_ him," Blue said. "Neeve, I _see_ him."

Blue had asked Neeve to describe to her what she could not see. It was a young man in slacks and a sweater, _like the ones from that school I saw earlier ,_ he wore an Aglionby sweater, and his hair rumpled. He was not quite transparent according to Neeve, but he wasn’t quite there, either. His figure was as murky as dirty water, his face indistinct. There was no identifying feature to him apart from his youth and sweater.

He was so young — that was the hardest part to get used to.

"Get his name," Neeve hissed. "He won’t answer me, and I need to get the others!"

"Me?" Blue replied, but she slid off the wall. Her heart was still ramming inside her rib cage. She asked, feeling a little foolish, "What’s your name?"

He didn’t seem to hear her. Without a twitch of acknowledgment, he began to move again, slow and bewildered, Blue _watched_ his faint orange move somewhere else.

Is this how we make our way to death? Blue wondered. A stumbling fade-out instead of a self-aware finale?

As Neeve began again to call out questions to the others, Blue decided to tap her way toward the wanderer.

"Who are you?" she called from a safe distance, as she was unsure of the path ahead of her and she really did not want to get too close to the boy.

There was no thrill in _seeing_ him, as she had thought there would be when one sees the dead. All she could think was, _He will be dead within a year_. How did Maura bear it?

Blue stole closer. This near to him, her hands were freezing. Her heart was freezing. Spirits with no warmth of their own sucked at her energy, pulling goose bumps up her arms. Blue heard her cane hit stone. The church. They were standing in front of the church.

The young man stood on the threshold of the church and Blue knew, just knew, that if he stepped into the church, she would lose the chance to get his name.

"Please," Blue said, softer than before. She reached out a hand and touched the very edge of his _aura_. Cold flooded through her like dread. She tried to steady herself with what she’d always been told: Spirits drew all their energy from their surroundings. All she was feeling was him using her to stay visible.

But it still felt a lot like dread.

She asked, "Will you tell me your name?"

"Gansey," he said. Though his voice was quiet, it wasn’t a whisper. It was a real voice spoken from someplace almost too far away to hear.

Blue couldn’t stop staring at the spirit’s _aura_ , it almost seemed like he was alive and there. This close, she could smell something minty that she wasn’t sure was unique to him or not.

He was so real. It felt like looking into the grave and _seeing_ something look back at her.

"Is that all?" she whispered.

"That’s all there is."

His _aura_ seemed to fall. _What is happening? Is there some reason for him to collapse?_ Then realization struck Blue.

"Neeve," Blue said. "Neeve, he’s—dying."

Neeve had come to stand just behind her. She replied, "Not yet."

Gansey was nearly gone now, _aura_ fading into the church, or the church fading into him.

Blue’s voice was breathier than she would have liked. "Why—why can I _see_ him?"

Neeve was silent. Already Blue felt warmth returning to her skin with Gansey’s absence, but something behind her lungs felt icy. A dangerous, sucking sadness seemed to be opening up inside her: grief or regret.

"There are only two reasons you would _see_ a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue. Either you’re his true love," Neeve said, "or you killed him."


	4. Chapter 4

It’s me," said Gansey.

He turned around so that he was facing his car. The Camaro’s bright orange hood was up, more as a symbol of defeat than for any practical use. Adam, friend of cars everywhere, might have been able to determine what was wrong with it this time, but Gansey certainly couldn’t. He’d managed to roll to a stop about four feet off the interstate and now the car’s fat tires sat off-kilter on top of lumpy tufts of valley grass. A semitruck roared by without pause; the Camaro rocked in its wake.

On the other end of the phone, his roommate Ronan Lynch replied, "You missed World Hist. I thought you were dead in a ditch."

Gansey flipped his wrist around to examine his watch. He had missed a lot more than World History. It was eleven o’clock, and already the chilliness of last night seemed improbable. A gnat was stuck in the perspiration on his skin next to the watch-band; he flicked it off. Gansey had camped, once, when he was younger. It had involved tents. Sleeping bags. An idling Range Rover parked nearby for when he and his father lost interest. As an experience, it had not been anything like last night.

He asked, "Did you get notes for me?"

"No," Ronan replied. "I thought you were dead in a ditch."

Gansey blew grit off his lips and readjusted the phone against his cheek. He would’ve gotten notes for Ronan. "The Pig stopped. Come get me."

A sedan slowed as it passed, the occupants staring out the window. Gansey was not an unpleasant-looking boy and the Camaro was not too hard on the eyes, either, but this attention had less to do with comeliness and more to do with the novelty of an Aglionby boy broken down by the side of the road in an impudently orange car. Gansey was well aware that there was nothing little Henrietta, Virginia, preferred over seeing humiliating things happen to Aglionby boys, unless it was seeing humiliating things happen to their families.

Ronan said, "Come on, man."

"It’s not like you’re going to class. You know what, it’ll be lunch break anyway." Then he added, perfunctory, "Please."

Ronan was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence; he knew it made people uncomfortable. But Gansey was immune from long exposure. He leaned into the car to see if he had any food in the glove box while he waited for Ronan to speak. Next to an EpiPen, there was a stick of beef jerky, but the jerky had expired two years ago. Possibly it had been there when he’d bought the car.

"Where are you?" Ronan asked, finally.

"Next to the Henrietta sign on 64. Bring me a burger. And a few gallons of gas." The car had not run out of gas, but it couldn’t hurt.

Ronan’s voice was acidic. "Gansey."

"Bring Adam, too."

Ronan hung up. Gansey stripped off his sweater and threw it in the back of the Camaro. The tiny back of the car was a cluttered marriage of everyday things — a chemistry textbook, a Frappuccino-stained notebook, a half-zipped CD binder with naked discs slithering out across the seat — and the supplies he’d acquired during his eighteen months in Henrietta. Rumpled maps, computer printouts, ever-present journal, flashlight, willow stick. When Gansey plucked a digital recorder out of the mess, a pizza receipt (one large deep-dish, half sausage, half avocado) fluttered to the seat, joining a half-dozen receipts identical except for the date.

All night he’d sat outside the monstrously modern Church of the Holy Redeemer, recorder running, ears straining, waiting for — something. The atmosphere had been less than magical. Possibly not the best place to try to make contact with the future dead, but Gansey had maintained high hopes for the power of St. Mark’s Eve. It wasn’t that he’d expected to see the dead. All of the sources said that church watchers had to possess "the second sight" and Gansey barely possessed first sight before he put his contacts in. He’d just hoped for —

Something. And that was what he had gotten. He just wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.

The digital recorder in hand, Gansey settled himself against the rear tire to wait, letting the car shield him from the buffeting of passing vehicles. On the other side of the guard rail, a greening field stretched out and down to the trees. Beyond it all rose the mysterious blue crest of the mountains.

On the dusty toe of his shoe, Gansey drew the arcing shape of the promised supernatural energy line that had led him here. As the mountain breeze rushed over his ears, it sounded like a hushed shout — not a whisper, but a loud cry from almost too far away to hear.

The thing was, Henrietta looked like a place where magic could happen. The valley seemed to whisper secrets. It was easier to believe that they wouldn’t give themselves up to Gansey rather than that they didn’t exist at all.

Please just tell me where you are.

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.

Ronan Lynch’s shark-nosed BMW pulled in behind the Camaro, its normally glossy charcoal paint dusted green with pollen. Gansey felt the bass of the stereo in his feet a moment before he made out the tune. When he stood up, Ronan was just opening his door. In the passenger seat was Adam Parrish, the third member of the foursome that made up Gansey’s closest friends. The knot of Adam’s tie was neat above the collar of his sweater. One slender hand pressed Ronan’s thin cell phone tightly to his ear.

Through the open car door, Adam and Gansey exchanged the briefest of looks. Adam’s knitted eyebrows asked, Did you find anything? and Gansey’s widened eyes replied, You tell me.

Adam, frowning now, spun the volume knob down on the stereo and said something into the phone.

Ronan slammed the car door — he slammed everything — before heading to the trunk. He said, "My dick brother wants us to meet him at Nino’s tonight. With Ashley."

"Is that who’s on the phone?" Gansey asked. "What’s Ashley?"

Ronan hefted a gas can from the trunk, making little effort to keep the greasy container from contacting his clothing. Like Gansey, he wore the Aglionby uniform, but, as always, he managed to make it look as disreputable as possible. His tie was knotted with a method best described as contempt and his shirt-tails were ragged beneath the bottom of his sweater. His smile was thin and sharp. If his BMW was shark-like, it had learned how from him. "Declan’s latest. We’re meant to look pretty for her."

Gansey resented having to play nicely with Ronan’s older brother, a senior at Aglionby, but he understood why they had to. Freedom in the Lynch family was a complicated thing, and at the moment, Declan held the keys to it.

Ronan traded the fuel can for the digital recorder. "He wants to do it tonight because he knows I have class."

The fuel-tank lid for the Camaro was located behind the spring-loaded license plate, and Ronan watched silently as Gansey simultaneously wrestled with the lid, the gas can, and the license plate.

"You could have done this," Gansey told him. "Since you don’t care about crapping up your shirt."

Unsympathetic, Ronan scratched at an old, brown scab beneath the five knotted leather bands he wore around his wrist. Last week, he and Adam had taken turns dragging each other on a moving dolly behind the BMW, and they both still had the marks to show it.

"Ask me if I found something," Gansey said.

Sighing, Ronan twitched the recorder toward Gansey. "Did you find anything?"

Ronan didn’t sound very interested, but that was part of the Ronan Lynch brand. It was impossible to tell how deep his disinterest truly was.

Fuel was leeching slowly into Gansey’s expensive chinos, the second pair he’d ruined in a month. It wasn’t that he meant to be careless — as Adam told him again and again, "Things cost money, Gansey" — it was just that he never seemed to realize the consequences of his actions until too late. "Something. I recorded about four hours of audio and there’s — something. But I don’t know what it means." He gestured to the recorder. "Give it a whirl."

Turning to stare out over the interstate, Ronan pressed PLAY. For a moment there was merely silence, broken only by icy-sounding shrills of crickets. Then, Gansey’s voice:

"Gansey," it said.

There was a long pause. Gansey rubbed a finger slowly along the pocked chrome of the Camaro’s bumper. It was still strange to hear himself on the recording, with no memory of saying the words.

Then, as if from very far away, a female voice, the words hard to make out: "Is that all?"

Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey, wary.

Gansey lifted his finger: Wait. Murmured voices, quieter than before, hissed from the recorder, nothing clear about them except the cadence: questions and answers. And then his disembodied voice spoke out of the recorder again:

"That’s all there is."

Ronan cast a glance back over to Gansey beside the car, doing what Gansey thought of as his smoker breath: long inhale through flared nostrils, slow exhale through parted lips.

Ronan did not smoke. He preferred his habits with hangovers.

He stopped the recorder and said, "You’re dripping gas on your pants, geezer."

"Aren’t you going to ask me what was happening when I recorded that?"

Ronan didn’t ask. He just kept looking at Gansey, which was the same thing.

"Nothing was happening. That’s what. I was staring at a parking lot full of bugs that shouldn’t be alive when it’s this cold overnight, and there was nothing."

Gansey hadn’t really been sure if he’d pick up anything in the parking lot, even if he was in the right place. According to the ley hunters he’d spoken to, the ley line sometimes transmitted voices across its length, throwing sounds hundreds of miles and dozens of years from when they’d first been heard. A sort of audio haunting, an unpredictable radio transmission where nearly anything on the ley line could be a receiver: a recorder, a stereo, a pair of well-tuned human ears. Lacking any psychic ability, Gansey had brought the recorder, as the noises were often only audible when played back. The strange thing in all this was not the other voices on the player. The strange thing was Gansey’s voice: Gansey was quite certain he was not a spirit.

"I didn’t say anything, Ronan. All night long, I didn’t say anything. So what’s my voice doing on the recorder?"

"How did you know it was there?"

"I was listening to what I’d recorded while I was driving back. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then: my voice. Then the Pig stopped."

"Coincidence?" Ronan asked. "I think not."

It was meant to be sarcastic. Gansey had said I don’t believe in coincidences so often that he no longer needed to.

Gansey asked, "Well, what do you think?"

"Holy grail, finally," Ronan replied, too sarcastic to be any use at all.

But the fact was this: Gansey had spent the last four years working with the thinnest scraps of evidence possible and the barely heard voice was all the encouragement he needed. His eighteen months in Henrietta had used some of the sketchiest scraps of all as he searched for a ley line — a perfectly straight, supernatural energy path that connected spiritual places — and the elusive tomb he hoped lay along its path. This was just an occupational hazard of looking for an invisible energy line. It was … well, invisible.

And possibly hypothetical, but Gansey refused to consider that notion. In seventeen years of life, he’d already found dozens of things people hadn’t known could be found, and he fully intended to add the ley line, the tomb, and the tomb’s royal occupant to that list of items.

A museum curator in New Mexico had once told Gansey, Son, you have an uncanny knack for discovering oddities. An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick. And a very old British professor had said, The world turns out its pockets for you, boy. The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realize they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who’d proven themselves worthy.

The way Gansey saw it was this: If you had a special knack for finding things, it meant you owed the world to look.

"Hey, is that Whelk?" Ronan asked.

A car had slowed considerably as it passed them, affording them a glimpse of its overly curious driver. Gansey had to agree that the driver did look a lot like their resentful Latin teacher, an Aglionby alumnus by the unfortunate name of Barrington Whelk. Gansey, owing to his official title of Richard "Dick" Campbell Gansey III, was fairly immune to posh names, but even he had to admit there wasn’t much forgivable about Barrington Whelk.

"Hey, don’t stop and help or anything," Ronan snapped after the car. "Hey, runt. What went down with Declan?"

This last part was directed at Adam as he climbed out of the BMW with Ronan’s phone still in hand. He offered it to Ronan, who shook his head disdainfully. Ronan despised all phones, including his own.

Adam said, "He’s coming by at five tonight."

Unlike Ronan, Adam’s Aglionby sweater was secondhand, but he’d taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.

"Joy," Gansey replied. "You’ll be there, right?"

"Am I invited?" Adam could be peculiarly polite. When he was uncertain about something, his Southern accent always made an appearance, and it was in evidence now.

Adam never needed an invitation. He and Ronan must’ve fought. Unsurprising. If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought with it.

"Don’t be stupid," Gansey replied, and graciously accepted the grease-splotched fast-food bag that Adam offered. "Thanks."

"Ronan got it," Adam said. In matters of money, he was quick to assign credit or blame.

Gansey looked to Ronan, who lounged against the Camaro, absently biting one of the leather straps on his wrist. Gansey said, "Tell me there’s no sauce on this burger."

Dropping the strap from his teeth, Ronan scoffed. "Please."

"No pickle, either," Adam said, crouching behind the car. He’d not only brought two small containers of fuel additive, but also a rag to place between the gas can and his khakis; he made the entire process look commonplace. Adam tried so hard to hide his roots, but they came out in the smallest of gestures.

Now Gansey grinned, the warmth of discovery starting to course through him. "So, pop quiz, Mr. Parrish. Three things that appear in the vicinity of ley lines?"

"Black dogs," Adam said indulgently. "Demonic presences."

"Camaros," Ronan inserted.

Gansey continued as if he hadn’t spoken. "And ghosts. Ronan, queue up the evidence if you would."

The three of them stood there in the late morning sun as Adam screwed the fuel-tank lid back on and Ronan rewound the player. Yards and yards away, over the mountains, a red-tailed hawk screamed thinly. Ronan pressed PLAY again and they listened to Gansey say his name into thin air. Adam frowned distantly, listening, the warm day reddening his cheeks.

It could have been any one of the mornings in the last year and a half. Ronan and Adam would make up by the end of the day, his teachers would forgive him for missing class, then he and Adam and Ronan and Noah would go out for pizza, four against Declan.

Adam said, "Try the car, Gansey."

Leaving the door hanging open, Gansey crashed onto the driver’s seat. In the background, Ronan played the recording again. For some reason, from this distance, the sound of the voices made the hair on his arms stand slowly. Something inside him said that this unconscious speech meant the start of something different, although he didn’t know what yet.

"Come on, Pig!" snarled Ronan. Someone laid on their horn as they blew by on the highway.

Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments — and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove. He tried one of the french fries they’d brought him. They were cold.

Adam leaned into the car. "We’ll follow you back to the school. It’ll get you back, but it’s not done yet," he said. "There’s still something wrong with it."

"Great," Gansey replied, loudly, to be heard over the engine. In the background, the BMW pumped out a nearly inaudible bass line as Ronan dissolved what was left of his heart in electronic loops. "So, suggestions?"

Reaching into his pocket, Adam retrieved a piece of paper and offered it to him.

"What’s this?" Gansey studied Adam’s erratic handwriting. His letters always looked like they were running from something. "A number for a psychic?"

"If you didn’t find anything last night, this was going to be next. Now you have something to ask them about."

Gansey considered. Psychics tended to tell him he had money coming his way and that he was destined for great things. The first one he knew was always true and the second one he was afraid might be. But maybe with this new clue, with a new psychic, they’d have something else to say.

"Okay," he agreed. "So what am I asking them?"

Adam handed him the digital recorder. He knocked the top of the Camaro once, twice, pensive.

"That seems obvious," he answered. "We find out who you were talking to."


	5. Chapter 5

Mornings at 300 Fox Way were fearful, jumbled things. Elbows in sides and lines for the bathroom and people snapping over tea bags placed into cups that already had tea bags in them. With Blue needing someone to help her get ready while the other women were trying to do the same for themselves. There _was_ school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts, after all. Toast got burned, cereal went soggy, the refrigerator door hung open and expectant for minutes at a time. Blue typically sat with her cane in hand and her backpack on her lap, listening to keys jingling as car pools were hastily decided.

Partway through breakfast, the phone would begin to ring, and Maura would say, "That’s the universe calling for you on line two, Orla" or something like that, and Jimi or Orla or one of the other aunts or half aunts or friends would fight over who had to pick it up on the upstairs phone. Two years ago, Blue’s cousin Orla had decided that a call-in psychic line would be a lucrative addition and, after some brief skirmishes with Maura about public image, Orla won. "Winning" involved Orla waiting until Maura needed to afford a laptop for Blue for school, and it was not so much a sore spot as the memory of a sore spot. Calls started coming in around seven A.M., and some days a dollar a minute felt more worth it than others.

Mornings were a sport. One that Blue liked to think she was getting better at for someone who could not see normally.

But the day after the church watch, Blue didn’t have to worry about battling for the bathroom or trying to make a bag lunch while Orla dropped toast butter-side down. When she woke up, she could hear in the next room over, Orla talking to either her boyfriend or to one of the psychic hotline callers. With Orla, it was difficult to tell the difference between the two sorts of calls. Both of them left Blue thinking she ought to shower afterward.

Blue took over the bathroom uncontested, where she would sit as one of the women in the household gave their attention to her hair. This time it was Orla, who had taken a break in her phone call to go to the bathroom. Blue’s dark hair was cut in a bob, long enough to plausibly pull back but short enough that it required an assembly of clips to do so successfully. The end result was a spiky, uneven ponytail populated by escaped chunks and mismatched clips; it looked eccentric and unkempt. Blue had not cared one way or the other what she looked like, but she loved the description of her appearance.

"Mom," she said as she rushed down the crooked stairs. Maura was at the kitchen counter making a mess of some kind of loose tea. It smelled appalling.

Her mother didn’t turn around. On the counter on either side of her were green, oceanic drifts of loose herbs. "You don’t have to run everywhere."

"You do," Blue retorted. "Why didn’t you wake me up for school like usual?"

"I did," Maura said. "Twice." Then, to herself, "Dammit."

From the table, Neeve’s mild voice said, "Do you need my help with that, Maura?" She sat at the table with a cup of tea, sounding angelic as always, no sign of having lost any sleep the night before. Neeve stared at Blue, who shifted uncomfortable as she _sensed_ the piercing gaze.

"I’m perfectly capable of making a damn meditation tea, thank you," Maura said. To Blue, she added, "I told the school you had the flu. I emphasized that you were vomiting. Remember to look peaked tomorrow."

Blue had never missed class the day after the church watch. Been sleepy, perhaps, but never wasted like last night.

"Was it because I saw him?" she asked. She wished that she couldn’t remember the boy so clearly. Or rather, the idea of him, his _aura_ sprawled on the ground. She wished she could un- _see_ it. "Is that why I slept so long?"

"It’s because fifteen spirits walked through your body while you chatted with a dead boy," Maura replied tersely, before Neeve could speak. "From what I’ve heard, anyway. Christ, is this what these leaves are supposed to smell like?"

Blue turned to Neeve, who continued to sip her tea with a sanguine air. "Is that true? Is it because spirits walked through me?"

"You did let them draw energy from you," Neeve replied. "You have quite a lot, and because you can’t _see_ them they take advantage of it."

Blue had two immediate thoughts about this. One was _I have quite a lot of energy_ and the other was _I think I am annoyed_. It was not as if she had intentionally allowed the spirits to draw power from her. She could not _see_ their _auras_ like she could with living things.

"You should teach her to protect herself," Neeve told Maura.

"I have taught her some things, but she can’t _see_ them, so it was a moot point. I’m not an entirely wretched mother," Maura said, handing Blue a cup of tea.

Blue said, "I’m not trying this. It smells awful." She was then handed a cup of yogurt from the fridge. Then, in solidarity with her mother, she told Neeve, "I’ve never had to protect myself at the church watch before."

Neeve mused, "That’s surprising. You amplify energy fields so much, I’m surprised they don’t find you, even here."

"Oh, stop," Maura said, sounding irritable. "There is nothing frightening about dead people."

Blue was still seeing Gansey’s ghostly _aura_. She said, "Mom, the church-watch spirits — can you ever prevent their deaths? By warning them?"

The phone rang then. It shrilled twice and kept going, which meant Orla was still on the line with the other caller.

"Damn Orla!" Maura said, though Orla wasn’t around to hear it.

"I’ll get it," Neeve said.

"Oh, but —" Maura didn’t finish what she was going to say. Blue wondered if she was thinking that Neeve normally worked for a lot more than a dollar a minute.

"I know what you’re thinking," her mother said, after Neeve had left the kitchen. "Most of them die from heart attacks and cancer and other things that just can’t be helped. That boy is going to die."

Blue was beginning to feel a phantom of the sensation she’d felt before, that strange grief. "I don’t think an Aglionby boy will die from a heart attack. Why do you bother telling your clients?"

"So they can get their things in order and do everything they want to do before they die." Her mother turned then, fixing Blue with a very knowing gaze.

"I’m not going to stop you from trying to warn him, Blue. But you need to know he’s not going to believe you, even if you find him, and it’s probably not going to save him, even if he knows. You might keep him from doing something stupid. Or you might just ruin the last few months of his life."

"You’re a Pollyanna," Blue snapped. But she knew Maura was right — at least about the first part. Most everyone who met her thought her mother did parlor tricks for a living. What did Blue think she would do — track down an Aglionby student with the help of her friends, then tap on the window of his Land Rover or Lexus, and warn him to have his brakes checked and life-insurance policy updated?

"I probably can’t stop you from meeting him anyway," Maura said. "I mean, if Neeve is right about why you saw him. You’re fated to meet him."

"Fate," Blue replied, glowering at her mother, "is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast."

"Everyone else," said Maura, "had breakfast a very long time ago."

The stairs creaked as Neeve returned. "Wrong number," she said in her affectless way. "Do you get many?"

"We’re one number off from a gentlemen escort company," Maura replied.

"Ah," Neeve said. "That explains it. Blue," she added, as she settled back down at the table again, "if you’d like, I can try to see what killed him."

This got both Maura’s and Blue’s attention in a hurry.

"Yes," Blue said.

Maura started to reply, then merely pressed her lips back together.

Neeve asked, "Do we have any grape juice?"

Maura went to the fridge and held up a jug questioningly. "Cran-grape?"

"That will work fine."

Maura, her face still complicated, then reached into the cupboard and drew out a dark blue salad bowl. She set it in front of Neeve, not gently.

"I won’t be responsible for anything that you see," Maura said to Neeve.

Blue asked, "What? What is that supposed to mean?"

Neither of them answered.

With a soft smile on her soft face, Neeve poured the juice into the bowl until it reached the edge. Maura turned off the light switch. The outside suddenly seemed vivid in comparison to the dim kitchen.

"If you are going to be here, please be quiet," Neeve remarked, looking at no one in particular. Blue jerked out a chair and sat. Maura leaned on the counter and crossed her arms. It was rare for Maura to be upset and not doing something about it.

Neeve asked, "What was his name again?"

"He only said Gansey." She felt self-conscious saying his name. Somehow the idea that she would have a hand in his life, or his death made his nominal existence in this kitchen her responsibility.

"That’s enough."

Neeve leaned over the bowl, her lips moving, her dark reflection moving slowly in the bowl. Blue kept thinking of what her mother had said:

I won’t be responsible for anything that you see.

It made this thing they did seem bigger than it usually felt. Further away from a trick of nature and closer to a religion.

Finally, Neeve murmured. Though Blue couldn’t hear any particular meaning in the wordless sound, Maura looked abruptly triumphant.

"Well," Neeve said. "This is a thing."

She said it like, "This is a thing," and Blue already knew how that turned out.

"What did you see?" Blue asked. "How did he die?"

"I saw him. And then he disappeared. Into absolutely nothing." Neeve answered.

Maura flipped her hands and her bracelets jingled from the motion. Blue knew the sound of gesture well. Her mother had used it to end many an argument after she’d delivered a winning line. Only this time the winning line had been delivered by a bowl of cran-grape juice, and Blue had no idea what it meant.

Neeve said, "One moment he was there, and the next, he didn’t exist."

"It happens," Maura said. "Here in Henrietta. There is some place — or places — that I can’t see. Other times, I see _things_ I wouldn’t expect."

Now Blue was recalling the countless times her mother had insisted that they stay in Henrietta, even as it became more expensive to live here, even when opportunities to go to other towns opened up. Blue had once heard one of Maura’s male clients ardently beg Maura to bring Blue "and whatever else you cannot live without" to his row house in Baltimore. In the reply, Maura had sternly informed him that this was not a possibility, for many reasons, chief of which that she would not leave Henrietta and least of which that she didn’t know if he was an ax murderer. He had left after that. Blue always wondered what became of him.

"I would like to know what you saw," Blue said. "What is ‘nothing’?"

Neeve said, "I was following the boy we saw last night to his death. I felt it was close, chronologically, but then he disappeared into someplace I couldn’t see. I don’t know how to explain it. I thought it was me."

"It’s not," Maura said. When she saw that Blue was still curious, she explained, "It’s like when there’s no picture on the television but you can tell it’s still on. That’s what it looks like. I’ve never seen someone go into it before, though."

"Well, he went into it." Neeve pushed the bowl away from her. "You said that’s not all. What else will that show me?"

Maura said, "Channels that don’t show up on basic cable."

Neeve tapped her beautiful fingers on the table, just once, and then she said, "You didn’t tell me about this before."

"It didn’t seem relevant," Maura replied.

"A place where young men can disappear seems quite relevant. Your daughter’s skill also seems quite relevant." Neeve leveled her eternal gaze on Maura, who pushed off the counter and turned away.

"I have work this afternoon," Blue said finally, when she realized that the conversation had perished. The reflection of the leaves outside rippled slowly in the bowl, a forest still, but darkly.

"Are you really going to work in that?" Maura asked.

Blue trailed her hands over her clothing. It involved a few thin layering shirts, including one her friend had altered using a method called shredding. "What’s wrong with it?"

Maura shrugged. "Nothing. I always wanted an eccentric daughter. I just never realized how well my evil plans were working. How late do you work?"

"Seven. Well, probably later. Cialina is supposed to work until seven thirty but she’s been saying all week that her brother got her tickets for Evening and if only someone would take over the last half hour …"

"You could say no. What’s Evening? Is that the one where all the girls die with hatchets?"

"That’s the one." As Blue slurped down her yogurt, she spared a quick glance at Neeve, who was still frowning at the bowl of juice, pushed just out of her reach. "Okay, I’m out."

She pushed back her chair. Maura was quiet in that heavy way that was louder than talking. Blue took her time tossing her yogurt into the trash can and dropping her spoon into the sink beside her mother, then she turned to go upstairs for her shoes and cane.

"Blue," Maura said finally. "I don’t have to tell you not to kiss anyone, right?"


	6. Chapter 6

Adam Parrish had been Gansey’s friend for eighteen months, and he knew that certain things came along with that friendship. Namely, believing in the supernatural, tolerating Gansey’s troubled relationship with money, and co-existing with Gansey’s other friends. The former two were problematic only when they took time away from Aglionby, and the latter was only problematic when it was Ronan Lynch.

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn’t know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

Sometimes Adam wondered if Ronan had been like Ronan before the Lynch brothers’ father had died, but only Gansey had known him then. Well, Gansey and Declan, but Declan seemed incapable of handling his brother now — which was why he’d been careful to schedule his visit while Ronan was in class.

Outside of 1136 Monmouth, Adam waited on the second-story landing with Declan and his girlfriend. Girlfriend, in fluttering white silk, looked a lot like Brianna, or Kayleigh, or whoever Declan’s last girlfriend had been. They all had blond, shoulder-length hair and eyebrows that matched Declan’s dark leather shoes. Declan, wearing the suit that his senior-year political internship required, looked thirty. Adam wondered if he would look that official in a suit, or if his childhood would betray him and render him ridiculous.

"Thanks for meeting us," Declan said.

Adam replied, "No problem."

Really, the reason he had agreed to walk with Declan and Girlfriend from Aglionby had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with a nagging hunch. Lately, Adam had felt as if someone had been … looking in on their search for the ley line. He wasn’t quite sure how to put this feeling into concrete terms. It was a stare caught out of the corner of his eye, a set of scuffed footprints in the stairwell that didn’t seem to belong to any of the boys, a library clerk telling him an arcane text had been checked out by someone else right after he had returned it. He didn’t want to trouble Gansey with it until he was certain, though. Things seemed to weigh heavily enough on Gansey as it was.

It wasn’t that Adam wondered if Declan was spying on them. Adam knew he was, but he believed that had everything to do with Ronan and nothing to do with the ley line. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of observation.

Currently, Girlfriend was glancing around in the furtive way that was more noticeable for its furtiveness. 1136 Monmouth was a hungry-looking brick factory, gutted and black-eyed, growing out of an overgrown lot that took up nearly all of a block. A clue to the building’s original identity was painted on the eastern side of the building: MONMOUTH MANUFACTURING. But for all their research, neither Gansey nor Adam had been able to figure out precisely what Monmouth had manufactured. Something that had required twenty-five-foot ceilings and wide-open spaces; something that had left moisture stains on the floor and gouges in the brick walls. Something that the world no longer needed.

At the top of the second-floor staircase, Declan whispered all this knowledge into Girlfriend’s ear, and she giggled nervously, as if it were a secret. Adam watched the way Declan’s lip barely brushed the bottom of Girlfriend’s earlobe as he spoke to her; he looked away just as Declan glanced up.

Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.

Girlfriend pointed out the cracked window toward the lot below; Declan followed her gaze to the black, angry curves Gansey and Ronan had left doing donuts. Declan’s expression hardened; even if they were all Gansey’s doing, he’d assume it was Ronan.

Adam had knocked already, but he knocked again — one long, two short, his signal. "It will be messy," he apologized.

This was more for the benefit of Declan’s girlfriend than it was for Declan, who knew full well what state the apartment would be in. Adam suspected Declan somehow found the mess charming to outsiders; Declan was calculating, if anything. His goal was Ashley’s virtue, and every step of tonight would have been planned with that in mind, even this brief stop at Monmouth Manufacturing.

There was still no answer.

"Should I call?" Declan asked.

Adam tried the knob, which was locked, and then jimmied it with his knee, lifting the door on its hinges a bit. It swung open. Girlfriend made a noise of approval, but the success of the break-in had more to do with the door’s failings than Adam’s strengths.

They stepped into the apartment and Girlfriend tipped her head back, back, back. The high ceiling soared above them, exposed iron beams holding up the roof. Gansey’s invented apartment was a dreamer’s laboratory. The entire second floor, thousands of square feet, spread out before them. Two of the walls were made up of old windows — dozens of tiny, warped panes, except for a few clear ones Gansey had replaced — and the other two walls were covered with maps: the mountains of Virginia, of Wales, of Europe. Marker lines arced across each of them. Across the floor, a telescope peered at the western sky; at its feet lay piles of arcane electronics meant to measure magnetic activity.

And everywhere, everywhere, there were books. Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed. Some of the books weren’t in English. Some of the books were dictionaries for the languages that some of the other books were in. Some of the books were actually Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions.

Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just wanting. One day, he’d have enough money to have a place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.

A small voice within Adam asked whether he would ever look this grand on the inside, or if it was something you had to be born into. Gansey was the way he was because he had lived with money when he was small, like a virtuoso placed at a piano bench as soon as he could sit. Adam, a latecomer, a usurper, still stumbled over his clumsy Henrietta accent and kept his change in a cereal box under his bed.

Beside Declan, Girlfriend held her hands to her chest in an unconscious reaction to masculine nakedness. In this case, the naked party was not a person, but a thing: Gansey’s bed, nothing but two mattresses on a bare metal frame, sitting baldly in the middle of the room, barely made. It was somehow intimate in its complete lack of privacy.

Gansey himself sat at an old desk with his back to them, gazing out an east-facing window and tapping a pen. His fat journal lay open near him, the pages fluttering with glued-in book passages and dark with notes. Adam was struck, as he occasionally was, by Gansey’s agelessness: an old man in a young body, or a young man in an old man’s life.

"It’s us," Adam said.

When Gansey didn’t reply, Adam led the way to his oblivious friend. Girlfriend made a variety of noises that all began with the letter O. With a variety of cereal boxes, packing containers, and house paint, Gansey had built a knee-high replica of the town of Henrietta in the center of the room, and so the three visitors were forced to walk down Main Street in order to reach the desk. Adam knew the truth: These buildings were a symptom of Gansey’s insomnia. A new wall for every night awake.

Adam stopped just beside Gansey. The area around him smelled strongly of mint from the leaf he chewed absently.

Adam tapped the earbud in Gansey’s right ear and his friend startled.

Gansey jumped to his feet. "Why, hello."

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

Girlfriend stared.

Adam remembered finding him intimidating when he first met him. There were two Ganseys: the one who lived inside his skin, and the one Gansey put on in the morning when he slid his wallet into the back pocket of his chinos. The former was troubled and passionate, with no discernible accent to Adam’s ears, and the latter bristled with latent power as he greeted people with the slippery, handsome accent of old Virginia money. It was a mystery to Adam how he could not seem to see both versions of Gansey at the same time.

"I didn’t hear you knock," Gansey said unnecessarily. He knocked fists with Adam. Coming from Gansey, the gesture was at once charming and self-conscious, a borrowed phrase of another language.

"Ashley, this is Gansey," Declan said, in his pleasant, neutral voice. It was a voice that reported tornado damage and cold fronts. Narrated side effects of small blue pills. Explained the safety procedures of this 747 we’re flying in today. He added, "Dick Gansey."

If Gansey was thinking Declan’s girlfriend was expendable, a renewable resource, he didn’t show it. He merely said, voice just a little chilly as he corrected, "As Declan knows, it’s my father who’s Dick. For me, it’s just Gansey."

Ashley looked more shocked than amused. "Dick?"

"Family name," Gansey said, with the weary air of someone trotting out a tired joke. "I try my best to ignore it."

"You’re Aglionby, right? This place is crazy. Why don’t you live on the school grounds?" Ashley asked.

"Because I own this building," Gansey said. "It’s a better investment than paying for dorm housing. You can’t sell your dorm after you’re done with school. And where did that money go? Nowhere."

Dick Gansey III hated to be told that he sounded like Dick Gansey II, but right then, he did. Both of them could trot out logic on a nice little leash, wearing a smart plaid jacket, when they wanted to.

"God," Ashley remarked. She glanced at Adam. Her eyes didn’t linger, but still, he remembered the fray on the shoulder of his sweater.

Don’t pick at it. She’s not looking at it. No one else notices it.

With effort, Adam squared his shoulders and tried to inhabit the uniform as easily as Gansey or Ronan.

"Ash, you won’t believe why Gansey came here, of all places," Declan said. "Tell her, Gansey."

Gansey couldn’t resist talking about Glendower. He never could. He asked, "How much do you know about Welsh kings?"

Ashley pursed her lips, her fingers pinching the skin at the base of her throat. "Mmmm. Llewellyn? Glendower? English Marcher lords?"

The smile on Gansey’s face could have lit coal mines. Adam hadn’t known about Llewellyn or Glendower when he’d first met Gansey. Gansey had needed to describe how Owain Glyndr — Owen Glendower to non-Welsh speakers — a medieval Welsh noble, had fought against the English for Welsh freedom and then, when capture seemed inevitable, disappeared from the island and from history altogether.

But Gansey never minded retelling the story. He’d related the events like they’d just happened, thrilled again by the magical signs that had accompanied Glendower’s birth, the rumors of his power of invisibility, the impossible victories against larger armies, and, finally, his mysterious escape. When Gansey spoke, Adam saw the green swell of the Welsh foothills, the wide glistening surface of the River Dee, the unforgiving northern mountains that Glendower vanished into. In Gansey’s stories, Owain Glyndr could never die.

Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, survived by his legacy.

Gansey, now fully warmed to his tale, enchanted again by the mystery of it, asked Ashley, "Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? The legends that heroes like Llewellyn and Glendower and Arthur aren’t really dead, but are instead sleeping in tombs, waiting to be woken up?"

Ashley blinked vapidly, then said, "Sounds like a metaphor."

Perhaps she wasn’t as dumb as they’d thought.

"Maybe so," Gansey said. He made a grandiose gesture to the maps on the wall, covered with the ley lines he believed Glendower had traveled along. Sweeping up the journal behind him, he paged through maps and notes as examples. "I think Glendower’s body was brought over to the New World. Specifically, here. Virginia. I want to find where he’s buried."

To Adam’s relief, Gansey left out the part about how he believed the legends that said Glendower was still alive, centuries later. He left out the part about how he believed the eternally sleeping Glendower would grant a favor to whoever woke him. He left out the part about how it haunted him, this need to find this long-lost king. He left out the midnight phone calls to Adam when he couldn’t sleep for obsessing about his search. He left out the microfiche and the museums, the newspaper features and the metal detectors, the frequent flier miles and the battered foreign language phrase books.

And he left out all the parts about magic and the ley line.

"That’s crazy," Ashley said. Her eyes were locked on the journal. "Why do you think he’s here?"

There were two possible versions of this answer. One was grounded merely in history and was infinitely suitable for general consumption. The other added divining rods and magic to the equation. Some days, some rotten days, Adam believed the former, and only barely. But being Gansey’s friend meant that more often he hoped for the latter. This was where Ronan, much to Adam’s dissatisfaction, excelled: His belief in the supernatural explanation was unwavering. Adam’s faith was imperfect.

Ashley, either because she was transient or because she’d been deemed skeptical, got the historical version. In his best professor voice, Gansey explained a bit about Welsh place names in the area, fifteenth-century artifacts found buried in Virginia soil, and historical support for an early, pre-Columbus Welsh landing in America.

Midway through the lecture, Noah — Monmouth Manufacturing’s reclusive third resident — emerged from the meticulous room directly next to the office Ronan had claimed as his bedroom. Noah’s bed shared the tiny space with a piece of mysterious equipment Adam guessed was some sort of printing press.

Noah, stepping farther into the room, didn’t so much smile at Ashley as goggle at her. He wasn’t the best with new people.

"That’s Noah," Declan said. He said it in a way that confirmed Adam’s assumption: Monmouth Manufacturing and the boys who lived in it were a tourist stop for Declan and Ashley, a conversation piece for a later dinner.

Noah extended his hand.

"Oh! Your hand is cold." Ashley cupped her fingers against her shirt to warm them.

"I’ve been dead for seven years," Noah said. "That’s as warm as they get."

Noah, unlike his pristine room, always seemed a little grubby. There was something out of place about his clothing, his mostly combed-back fair hair. His unkempt uniform always made Adam feel a little less like he stuck out. It was hard to feel like part of the Aglionby crowd when standing next to Gansey, whose crisp-as-George-Washington white collared shirt alone cost more than Adam’s bicycle (anyone who said you couldn’t tell the difference between a shirt from the mall and a shirt made by a clever Italian man had never seen the latter), or even Ronan, who had spent nine hundred dollars on a tattoo merely to piss off his brother.

Ashley’s obliging giggle was cut off as Ronan’s bedroom door opened. A cloud like there would never be sun again crossed Declan’s face.

Ronan and Declan Lynch were undeniably brothers, with the same dark brown hair and sharp nose, but Declan was solid where Ronan was brittle. Declan’s wide jaw and smile said, Vote for me while Ronan’s buzzed head and thin mouth warned that this species was poisonous.

"Ronan," Declan said. On the phone with Adam earlier, he had asked, When will Ronan not be available? "I thought you had tennis."

"I did," Ronan replied.

There was a moment of silence, where Declan considered what he wanted to say in front of Ashley, and Ronan enjoyed the effect that awkward silence had on his brother. The two elder Lynch brothers — there were three total at Aglionby — had been at odds for as long as Adam had known them. Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder brother Declan, and so the lines had been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.

Declan waited a second too long to speak, and Ronan crossed his arms over his chest. "You’ve got quite the guy here, Ashley. You’ll have a great night with him and then some other girl can have a great night with him tomorrow."

A fly buzzed against a windowpane far above their heads. Behind Ronan, his door, covered with photocopies of his speeding tickets, drifted closed.

Ashley’s mouth didn’t make an O so much as a sideways D. A second too late, Gansey punched Ronan in the arm.

"He’s sorry," Gansey said.

Ashley’s mouth was slowly closing. She blinked at the map of Wales and back to Ronan. He’d chosen his weapon well: only the truth, untempered by kindness.

"My brother is —" said Declan. But he didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything he could say that Ronan hadn’t already proven. He said, "We’re going now. Ronan, I think you need to reconsider your —" But again, he had no words to end the sentence. His brother had taken all the catchy ones.

Declan snagged Ashley’s hand, jerking her attention away and toward the apartment door.

"Declan," Gansey started.

"Don’t try to make this better," Declan warned. As he pulled Ashley out into the tiny stairwell and down the stairs, Adam heard the beginnings of damage control: He has problems, I told you, I tried to make sure he wouldn’t be here, he’s the one who found Dad, it messed him up, let’s go get seafood instead, don’t you think we look like lobster tonight? We do.

The moment the apartment door was closed, Gansey said, "Come on, Ronan."

Ronan’s expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn’t that he didn’t condone them; he couldn’t understand them.

"So he’s a man-whore. It’s not your problem," Gansey said. Ronan was not really Gansey’s problem, either, in Adam’s opinion, but they’d had this argument before.

One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor.

Gansey strapped his journal closed. "That doesn’t work on me. She had nothing to do with you and Declan." He said you and Declan like it was a physical object, something you could pick up and look underneath. "You treated her badly. You made the rest of us look bad."

Ronan looked chastened, but Adam knew better. Ronan wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry that Gansey had been there to see him. What lived between the Lynch brothers was dark enough to hide anyone else’s feelings.

But surely Gansey knew that as well as Adam. He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice, and Adam never bothered to point out. Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, "Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out."

This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.

"I’m not coming," Noah said.

"Need some more alone time?" Ronan asked.

"Ronan," Gansey interjected. "Set your weapons to stun, will you? Noah, we won’t make you eat. Adam?"

Adam glanced up, distracted. His mind had wandered from Ronan’s bad behavior to Ashley’s interest in the journal, and he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily propiertary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.

But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.

Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor.

And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.

"Parrish," Gansey repeated. "Come on."

Adam made a face. He felt it would take more than pizza to improve Ronan’s character.

But Gansey was already grabbing the car keys to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling, and Noah was sighing, and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.

"Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.


	7. Chapter 7

Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building. It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.

"Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?"

Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well-scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him. St. Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough. Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.

Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the name written on the topmost paper.

"Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?"

Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.

Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. "How do you get him to come to class?"

The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.

Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him. The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.

When did this become my life?

Whelk shrugged. "I don’t remember him skipping."

"You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?" Milo asked. "That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks."

It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.

He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. "Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t. Not in mine, anyway."

"Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about," Milo said.

This got Whelk’s attention. No one knew that today was St. Mark’s Day. No one celebrated St. Mark’s Day, not even St. Mark’s mother. Only Whelk and Czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers, cared about its existence.

Whelk said, "Beg pardon?"

"I don’t know what all’s going on," Milo replied. One of the other teachers said hi to him on the way out of the staff room, and Milo looked over his shoulder to reply. Whelk imagined grabbing Milo’s arm, forcing his attention back his way. It took all of his effort to wait instead. Turning back around, Milo seemed to sense Whelk’s interest, because he added, "He hasn’t talked to you about it? He wouldn’t shut up about it yesterday. It’s that ley line stuff he’s always on about."

Ley line.

If no one knew about St. Mark’s Day, truly no one knew about ley lines. Certainly no one in Henrietta, Virginia. Certainly not one of Aglionby’s richest pupils. Definitely not in conjunction with St. Mark’s Day. This was Whelk’s quest, Whelk’s treasure, Whelk’s teen years. Why was Richard Gansey III talking about it?

With the words ley line spoken aloud, a memory was conjured: Whelk in a dense wood, sweat collected on his upper lip. He was seventeen and shivering. Every time his heart beat, red lines streaked in the corners of his vision, the trees darkening with his pulse. It made the leaves seem like they were all moving, though there was no wind. Czerny was on the ground. Not dead, but dying. His legs still pedaled on the uneven surface beside his red car, making drifts of fallen leaves behind him. His face was just … done. In Whelk’s head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together.

"Some sort of energy source or something," Milo said.

Whelk was suddenly afraid that Milo could see the memory on him, could hear the inexplicable voices in his head, incomprehensible but nonetheless present ever since that failed day.

Whelk schooled his features, though what he was really thinking was: If someone else is looking here, I must have been right. It must be here.

"What did he say he was doing with the ley line?" he asked with studied calm.

"I don’t know. Ask him about it. I’m sure he’d love to talk your ear off about it." Milo looked over his shoulder as the secretary joined them in the hall, her bag on her arm, her jacket in her hand. Her eyeliner was smudged after a long day in the office.

"We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?" the secretary asked. She had a pencil stuck in her hair to keep it up and Whelk stared at the stray strands that wound up around the lead. It was clear to him from the way she stood that she secretly found Milo attractive, despite the plaid and the corduroy and the beard. She asked, "Do you know how much Gansey senior is worth? I wonder if he knows what his kid spends all his time on. Man, sometimes these entitled little bastards make me want to slit my wrists. Jonah, are you coming with me for a smoke break or not?"

"I quit," said Milo. He cast a quick, uneasy glance from the secretary to Whelk, and Whelk knew he was thinking about how much Whelk’s father had been worth, once upon a time, and how little he was worth now, long after the trials had left the front pages of the newspapers. All the junior faculty and the admin staff hated the Aglionby boys, hated them for what they had and what they stood for, and Whelk knew they were all secretly pleased that he had fallen down among their ranks.

"How about you, Barry?" the secretary asked. Then she answered her own question: "No, you don’t smoke, you’re too pretty for that. Oh well, I’ll go myself."

Milo turned to go as well.

"Feel better," he said kindly, although Whelk had never said he was sick.

The voices in Whelk’s head were a roar, but for once, his own thoughts had drowned them out.

"I think I do already," said Whelk.

It was possible that Czerny’s death wasn’t for nothing after all.


	8. Chapter 8

Blue wouldn’t really describe herself as a waitress. After all, she also worked as a psychic, mainly carding readings but occasionally reading someone's palm, or sat in on her mother’s clients readings to help her. Really, being a waitress at Nino’s was the least of things she did. But the hours were flexible, it was the most legitimate-looking entry on her already bizarre résumé, and it certainly paid the best.

There was really only one problem with Nino’s, and it was that for all practical purposes, it belonged to Aglionby. The restaurant was six blocks over from the iron-gated Aglionby campus at the very edge of the historic downtown. It wasn’t the nicest place in Henrietta. There were others with bigger televisions and louder music, but none of them had managed to grip the school’s imagination like Nino’s. Just to know that Nino’s was the place to be was a rite of passage; if you could be seduced by Morton’s Sports Bar on Third, you didn’t deserve to be in the inner circle.

So the Aglionby boys at Nino’s were not just Aglionby students, but they were the most Aglionby that the school had to offer. Loud, pushy, entitled.

Blue had _seen_ enough of the raven boys to last a lifetime.

Tonight, the music was already loud enough to paralyze the finer parts of her personality. She tied on her apron, tuned out the Beastie Boys as best she could, and put her tip-earning smile on.

Close to the beginning of her shift, Blue _saw_ three boys came through the front door, letting a cold hiss of fresh air into the room that smelled of oregano and beer. The boy in front was talking on his cell phone even as he showed Cialina four fingers to indicate party size. Raven boys were good at multitasking, so long as all tasks were exclusively to benefit themselves.

As Cialina hurried by, murmuring how many menus she needed, Blue handed her four greasy menus.

Blue asked, very unwilling, "Do you want me to take that table?"

"Are you kidding?" Cialina replied, eyeing the four boys. She described what was going on to Blue. The first one of them had finally ended his call and slid into one of the orange vinyl booths. The tallest of them knocked his head on the green cut-glass light hanging over the table; the others laughed generously at him. He said, Bitch. A tattoo snaked out above his collar as he swiveled to sit down. A sulky one sitting at the end of the booth. Blue only _saw_ three though, but _sensed_ a fourth one. _I am going to ask Mom about that later_. Cialina said that there was something hungry about all of the boys.

Blue didn’t want them anyway. Raven boys were rude about her blindness and always tried to get away with things they normally wouldn’t be able to.

What she wanted was a job that wouldn’t suck all the thoughts out of her head and replace them with the leering call of a synthesizer. Sometimes, Blue would creep outside for an infinitesimal break, and as she lay her head back against the brick wall of the alley behind the restaurant, she’d dream idly about careers studying trees. Swimming with manta rays. Scouring Costa Rica to find out more about the scale-crested pygmy tyrant, for all she cared.

Really, she didn’t know if she’d truly like to find out more about the pygmy tyrant. She just liked the name, because, for a five-foot-tall girl, pygmy tyrant sounded like a career.

All of those imagined lives seemed pretty far away from Nino’s.

Just a few minutes after Blue’s shift began, the manager called to Blue from the kitchen. Tonight it was Donny. Nino’s had about fifteen managers, all of them related to the owner and none of them high-school graduates.

Donny managed to both lounge and offer the phone at once. "Your parent. Uh, mother. Here."

But there was no need to clarify, because Blue didn’t really know who her other parent was. Actually, she’d tried to pester Maura about her father before, but her mother had neatly slithered out of that line of questioning.

Donny gently placed the phone in her hand, Blue tucked herself back into the corner of the kitchen, next to a terminally greasy fridge and a large-basined sink. Despite her care, she still got jostled every few moments.

"Mom, I’m working."

"Don’t panic. Are you sitting? You probably don’t need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on something. He called. To schedule a reading."

"Who, Mom? Speak louder. It’s loud here."

"Gansey."

For a moment, Blue didn’t understand. Then realization tumbled down, weighting her feet. Her voice was a bit faint. "When … did you schedule it for?"

"Tomorrow afternoon. It was the fastest I could get him in. I tried to get him in sooner, but he said he had school. Do you have a shift tomorrow?"

"I’m changing it," Blue replied immediately. It was someone else saying the words, though. The real Blue was back in the churchyard, hearing his voice say Gansey.

"Yes, you are. Go work."

As she hung up, she could feel her pulse fluttering. It was real. He was real.

It was all true and terribly, terribly specific.

It seemed foolish to be here, now, showing strangers their booths, taking their orders, and smiling all the while. She wanted to be home, leaning back against the cool bark of the spreading beech tree behind the house, trying to decide what this changed about her life. Neeve had said this was the year she’d fall in love. Maura had said that she’d kill her true love if she kissed him. Gansey was supposed to die this year. What were the odds? Gansey had to be her true love. He had to be. Because there was no way she was going to kill someone.

Is this the way life is supposed to be? Maybe it would be better not to know.

Something touched her shoulder.

Touching was strictly against Blue’s policy. No one was to touch her person while she was at Nino’s, even if she is blind, and especially no one was to touch her now, when she was having a crisis. She whirled.

"Can. I. Help. You?"

Before her stood the _aura_ of multitasking cell phone Aglionby boy, giving off the sense of looking tidy and presidential. President Cell Phone had probably been closer to a pygmy tyrant than she would ever be.

"I certainly hope so," he said, in a way that indicated less hope and more certainty. He had to speak loudly to be heard, and Blue could _see_ that he had to incline his head to meet her eyes. There was something annoyingly impressive about him, an impression that he was very tall, although he was no taller than most boys. "My socially inhibited friend Adam thinks you’re cute, but he’s unwilling to make a move. Over there. Not the smudgy one. Not the sulky one. Oh! Shit! You—" He stuttered to say his realization, “You’re _blind_!”

"So?" she asked, more annoyed than before.

The boy took a moment to recover from his blunder.

“Sorry, I was pointing him out to you at our booth. Uh,” He hesitated before deciding to continue with his initial request, "So would you do me a favor and come over and talk to him?"

Blue used one millisecond of her time to imagine what that might be like, throwing herself at a booth of raven boys and wading through awkward, vaguely sexist conversation. It was not a pleasant millisecond.

"What exactly is it you think I’m going to talk to him about?

President Cell Phone shifted on his feet. "We’ll think of something. We’re interesting people."

Blue doubted it. For one brief, brief moment that she was later ashamed of and bemused by, Blue considered telling President Cell Phone when her shift ended. But then Donny called her name from the kitchen, and she remembered rules number one and two.

She said, "Do you see how I’m wearing this apron? It means I’m working. For a living."

The boy paused for a moment. Then he said, "I’ll take care of it."

She echoed, "Take care of it?"

"Yeah. How much do you make in an hour? I’ll take care of it. And I’ll talk to your manager."

For a moment, Blue was actually lost for words. She had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but she was. She opened her mouth, and at first, all that came out was air. Then something like the beginning of a laugh. Then, finally, she managed to sputter, "I am not a prostitute."

The Aglionby boy seemed puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned as he sharply inhaled. "Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said."

"That is what you said! You think you can just pay me to talk to your friend? Clearly you pay most of your female companions by the hour and don’t know how it works with the real world, but … but …" Blue remembered that she was working to a point, but not what that point was. Indignation had eliminated all higher functions and all that remained was the desire to slap him. The boy opened his mouth to protest, and her thought came back to her all in a rush. "Most girls, when they’re interested in a guy, will sit with them for free."

To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, "You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unfair that you’re not doing the same for me."

"I feel you’re being condescending," Blue said.

In the background, she heard his friends imitate a plane crashing, another laughing, and one groaning. The one groaning was likely Cell Phone’s friend he was trying, and failing, to set up with Blue.

"Dear God," remarked Cell Phone boy. "I don’t know what else to say."

"‘Sorry,’" she recommended.

"I said that already."

Blue considered. "Then, ‘bye.’"

His _aura_ outlined that he made a little gesture at his chest, bowing maybe, before walking away. Calla would’ve flipped him off, but Blue just stuffed her hands in her apron pockets.

As President Cell Phone headed back to his table and picked up a fat leather journal that seemed incongruous with the rest of him, one of the boys let out a derisive laugh and she heard him mimic, "… ‘not a prostitute.’" Beside him, the boy who let out a groan, his _aura_ outlined him ducking his head. He was embarrassed.

Not for a hundred dollars, Blue thought. Not for two hundred dollars.

But she had to confess she was a little undone by the boy’s embarrassment. It didn’t seem very … Aglionby. Did raven boys get embarrassed?

She’d stared a moment too long. The elegant boy looked up and caught her gaze.

Remembering everything Cell Phone boy said. _I’ll take care of it_. She shot him a foul look, a real Calla number, and whirled back toward the kitchen.

Neeve had to be wrong. She’d never fall in love with one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOW BLUE CAN SEE:  
> I feel as though I should explain how I imagine Blue sees people. Having been blind since birth, she can not offer a comparing difference between what she sees verses what others would normally see. Having never seen color before all she can do is vaguely describe the color of the auras she sees and stick with the names her family states that they are. That's why I italicize the colors Blue uses to describe a person's auras because it's not like she can actually figure out what they truly are. The auras she sees makes up the entire living thing. Therefore she can tell how tall a person is and if they are making a gesture. She doesn't tell any normal person she can do this, so only her family of psychics know. Blue can not see the dead because they are not alive anymore. She can sense their presence like how one can sense another person is in the room without seeing them. Blue can not see a person's face, think infrared cameras but without the creepy detailed outline of a person's face. Blue is very much blind to non-living things, hence she needs a cane. The Ley line of Henrietta enables Blue to see the auras of others, that and she is one powerful psychic. 
> 
> BLUE'S POWERS:  
> I'm sticking with vague details about her powers cause I'm not sure what else I want her to be able to do. Confirmed powers though is her ability to amplify others, see/sense auras, commune with the dead, palm readings, and she can read tarot cards. I think I'm going to have her be able to see the Ley Lines cause I think that would be super cool.


	9. Chapter 9

"Tell me again," Gansey asked Adam, "why you think a psychic is a good idea?"

The pizzas had been demolished (no help from Noah), which made Gansey feel better and Ronan feel worse. By the end the meal, Ronan had picked off all his moving-dolly scabs and he would’ve picked off Adam’s as well if he’d let him. Gansey sent him outside to blow off steam and Noah to babysit him.

Now Gansey and Adam stood in line while a woman argued about mushroom topping with the cashier.

"They deal in energy work," said Adam, just loud enough to be heard over the blaring music. He studied his arm where he’d worried his own scab off. The skin beneath looked a little angry. Looking up, he peered over his shoulder, probably looking for the evil, _blind_ , not-a-prostitute waitress. Part of Gansey felt guilty for botching Adam’s chances with her. The other part felt he’d possibly saved Adam from having his spinal cord ripped out and devoured.

It was possible, Gansey thought, that he’d once again been oblivious about money. He hadn’t meant to be offensive but, in retrospect, it was possible he had been. This was going to eat at him all evening. He vowed, as he had a hundred times before, to consider his words better. _I'll take care of it_. Gansey's breath hitched when he remembered what he said. Adam pulled him out of his thoughts however.

Adam continued, "The ley lines are energy. Energy and energy."

"Matchy matchy," Gansey replied. "If the psychic is for real."

Adam said, "Beggars can’t be choosers."

Gansey looked at the handwritten ticket for the pizza in his hand. According to the bubbly writing, their waitress’s name had been Cialina. She’d included her telephone number, but it was hard to say which boy she’d been hoping to attract. Some of the parties at the table were less dangerous to consort with than others. She clearly hadn’t found him condescending.

Which was probably because she hadn’t heard him speak.

All night. This was going to bother him all night. He said, "I wish we had a sense of how wide the lines were. I don’t know if we’re looking for a thread or a highway, even after all this time. We could’ve been feet away from it and never known."

Adam’s neck might have broken from all the looking around he was doing. There was still no sign of the waitress. He looked tired, up too late too many nights in a row working and studying. Gansey hated seeing him like this, but nothing he thought of in his head sounded like something he could actually say to him. Adam wouldn’t tolerate pity.

"We know they can be dowsed, so they can’t be that narrow," Adam said. He rubbed the back of his hand against his temple.

That was what had brought Gansey to Henrietta in the first place: months of dowsing and research. Later, he’d tried to dowse the line more precisely with Adam. They’d circled the town with a willow divining rod and an electromagnetic-frequency reader, swapping the instruments between the two of them. The machine had spiked strangely a few times, and Gansey had thought he’d felt the divining rod twitch in his hands in time with it, but it might have been wishful thinking by that point.

I could tell him his grades are going to go to hell if he doesn’t cut back on his hours, Gansey thought, looking at the dark skin beneath Adam’s eyes. If he made it about him, Adam wouldn’t interpret it as charity. He considered how to frame it so that it sounded selfish: You’re no good to me if you get mono or something. Adam would see through that in a second.

Instead, Gansey said, "We need a solid point A before we even start thinking about point B."

But they had point A. They even had point B. The problem was just that the points were too large. Gansey had a map torn from a book depicting Virginia with the ley line marked darkly across it. Like the ley-line enthusiasts in the UK, American ley-line seekers determined key spiritual places and drew lines between them until the arc of the ley line became obvious. It seemed like all the work had been done for them already.

But the creators of those maps had never meant for them to be used as road maps; they were too approximate. One of the maps listed merely New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, as possible reference points. Each of those points was miles wide, and even the finest of pencil lines drawn on a map was no narrower than thirty-five feet — even eliminating the possibilities left them with thousands of acres where the ley line could be. Thousands of acres where Glendower could be, if he was along the ley line at all.

"I wonder," Adam mused aloud, "if we could electrify either the rods or the line. Hook up a car battery to them or something."

If you got a loan, you could stop working until after college. No, that would immediately birth an argument. Gansey shook his head a little, more at his own thoughts than at Adam’s comment. He said, "That sounds like either the beginning of a torture session or a music video."

Adam’s searching-for-white-eyed-devil-waitress face had given way to his brilliant-idea face. The fatigue melted away. "Well, amplification. That’s all I was thinking. Something to make it louder and easier to follow."

It wasn’t an awful idea. Last year in Montana, Gansey had interviewed a lightning-strike victim. The boy had been sitting on his ATV in the doorway of a cattle barn when he was struck, and the incident had left him with an inexplicable fear of being indoors and an uncanny ability to follow one of the western ley lines using only a bent bit of radio antenna. For two days, they’d trailed together across fields carved by glaciers and marked by round hay bales higher than their heads, finding hidden water sources and tiny caves and lightning-burned stumps and strangely marked stones. Gansey had tried to convince the boy to come back to the East Coast to perform his same miracle on the ley line there, but the boy’s newly pathological fear of the indoors ruled out all plane and car travel. And it was a long walk.

Still, it wasn’t an entirely useless exercise. It was further proof of the amorphous theory Adam had just described: ley lines and electricity could be linked. Energy and energy.

Matchy matchy.

As he moved up to the counter, Gansey became aware that Noah was lurking at his elbow, looking strained and urgent. Both were typical for Noah, so Gansey was not immediately troubled. He passed a folded-over packet of bills to the cashier. Noah continued to hover.

"Noah, what?" demanded Gansey.

Noah seemed about to put his hands in his pockets and then didn’t. Noah’s hands seemed to belong fewer places than other people’s. He eventually just let them hang as he looked at Gansey. He said, "Declan’s here."

An immediate scan of the restaurant offered nothing. Gansey demanded, "Where?"

"Parking lot," Noah said. "He and Ronan —"

Not bothering to wait for the rest of the sentence, Gansey burst out into the black evening. Scrambling around the side of the building, he skidded onto the parking lot just in time to see Ronan throw a punch.

The swing was infinite.

From the looks of it, it was the opening act. In the sickly green light of a buzzing streetlamp, Ronan had an unbreakable stance and an expression hard as granite. There was no wavering in the line of the blow; he had accepted the consequences of wherever his fist landed long before he began the punch.

From his father, Gansey had gotten a head for logic, an affection for research, and a trust fund the size of most state lotteries.

From their father, the Lynch brothers had gotten indefatigable egos, a decade of obscure Irish music instrument lessons, and the ability to box like they meant it. Niall Lynch had not been around very much, but when he had been, he had been an excellent teacher.

"Ronan!" Gansey shouted, too late.

Declan went down, but before Gansey even had time to form a plan of action, he was back up again, fist smacking into his brother. Ronan released a string of profanity so varied and pointed that Gansey was amazed that the words alone didn’t slay Declan. Arms windmilled. Knees met chests. Elbows rammed into faces. Then Ronan grabbed Declan’s suit coat and used it to throw him onto the mirrorlike hood of Declan’s Volvo.

"Not the fucking car!" snarled Declan, his lip bloody.

The story of the Lynch family was this: Once upon a time, a man named Niall Lynch had three sons, one of whom loved his father more than the others. Niall Lynch was handsome and charismatic and rich and mysterious, and one day, he was dragged from his charcoal-gray BMW and beaten to death with a tire iron. It was a Wednesday. On Thursday, his son Ronan found his body in the driveway. On Friday, their mother stopped speaking and never spoke again.

On Saturday, the Lynch brothers found that their father’s death left them rich and homeless. The will forbade them to touch anything in the house — their clothing, the furniture. Their silent mother. The will demanded they immediately move into Aglionby housing. Declan, the eldest, was meant to control the funds and their lives until his brothers reached eighteen.

On Sunday, Ronan stole his deceased father’s car.

On Monday, the Lynch brothers stopped being friends.

Ripping Ronan from the Volvo, Declan hit his brother hard enough that even Gansey felt it. Ashley, her light hair more visible than the rest of her, blinked at him from inside the Volvo.

Gansey took several strides across the lot. "Ronan!"

Ronan didn’t even turn his head. A grim smile, more skeleton than boy, was etched onto his mouth as the brothers whirled around. This was a real fight, not for show, and it played in fast-forward. Someone would be unconscious before Gansey had time to cry havoc, and he just didn’t have time to take someone to the ER tonight.

Gansey sprang, seizing Ronan’s arm in mid-swing. Ronan still had fingers hooked inside Declan’s mouth, though, and Declan already had a fist flying from behind, like a violent embrace. So it was Gansey who got Declan’s blow. Something wet misted his arm. He was fairly certain it was spit, but it was possible it was blood. He shouted a word he’d learned from his sister, Helen.

Ronan had Declan by the knot of his burgundy tie, and Declan gripped the back of his brother’s skull with one white-knuckled hand. Gansey might as well have not been there. With a neat flick of his wrist, Ronan smacked Declan’s head off the driver’s side door of the Volvo. It made a sick, wet sound. Declan’s hand fell away.

Gansey seized the opportunity to propel Ronan about five feet away. Jerking in his grip, Ronan jackrabbited his legs on the pavement. He was unbelievably strong.

"Quit it," Gansey panted. "You’re ruining your face."

Ronan twisted, all muscle and adrenaline. Declan, his suit looking more bedraggled than any suit ought to look, started back toward them. He had a hell of a bruise rising on his temple, but he looked ready to go again. There was no way of telling what had set them off — a new home nurse for their mother, a poor grade at school, an unexplained credit card bill. Maybe just Ashley.

Across the lot, the manager of Nino’s emerged from the front entrance. It wouldn’t be long before the cops were called. Where was Adam?

"Declan," Gansey said, voice full of warning, "if you come back over here, I swear …"

With a jerk of his chin, Declan spit blood at the pavement. His lip was bleeding, but his teeth were still good. "Fine. He’s your dog, Gansey. You leash him. Keep him from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of him."

"I wish," snarled Ronan. His entire body was rigid underneath Gansey’s hand. He wore his hatred like a cruel second skin.

Declan said, "You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan. If Dad saw —" and this made Ronan burst forward again. Gansey clamped arms around Ronan’s chest and dragged him back.

"Why are you even here?" Gansey asked Declan.

"Ashley had to use the bathroom," Declan replied crisply. "I should be able to stop where I like, don’t you think?"

The last time Gansey had been in the Nino’s co-ed bathroom, it had smelled like vomit and beer. On one of the walls, a red Sharpie had scrawled the word BEEZLEBUB and Ronan’s number below. It was hard to imagine Declan choosing to inflict Nino’s facilities on his girlfriend. Gansey’s voice was short. "I think you should just go. This isn’t getting solved tonight."

Declan laughed, just once. A big, careless laugh, full of round vowels. He clearly found nothing about Ronan funny.

"Ask him if he’s going to get by with a B this year," he told Gansey. "Do you ever go to class, Ronan?"

Behind Declan, Ashley peered out of the driver’s side window. She’d rolled down the window to listen; she didn’t look nearly as much like an idiot when she thought no one was paying any attention to her. It seemed like justice that perhaps this time, Declan was the one getting played.

"I’m not saying you’re wrong, Declan," Gansey said. His ear throbbed where it had been boxed. He could feel Ronan’s pulse crashing in his arm where he restrained him. His vow to consider his words more carefully came back to him, and so he framed the rest of the statement in his head before saying it out loud. "But you are not Niall Lynch, and you won’t ever be. And you’d get ahead a lot faster if you stopped trying."

Gansey released Ronan.

Ronan didn’t move, though, and neither did Declan, as if by saying their father’s name, Gansey had cast a spell. They wore matching raw expressions. Different wounds inflicted by the same weapon.

"I’m only trying to help," Declan said finally, but he sounded defeated. There was a time, a few months ago, when Gansey would’ve believed him.

Next to Gansey, Ronan’s hands hung open at his sides. Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else. When Ronan was hit, it was the opposite; he became so urgently present that it was as if he’d been sleeping before.

Ronan told his brother, "I’ll never forgive you."

The Volvo’s window hissed closed, as if Ashley had just realized that this had become a conversation she wasn’t meant to hear.

Sucking on his bloody lip, Declan looked at the ground for a bare moment. Then he straightened and adjusted his tie.

"Wouldn’t mean much from you anymore," he said, and tugged open the Volvo’s door.

As he slid into the driver’s seat, Declan said, "I don’t want to talk about it" to Ashley and slammed the door shut. The Volvo’s tires squealed as they bit into the pavement, and then Gansey and Ronan were left standing next to each other in the strange dim light of the parking lot. A block away, a dog barked balefully, three times. Ronan touched his pinkie finger to his eyebrow to check for blood, but there was none, just a raised, angry bump.

"Fix it," Gansey said. He wasn’t entirely sure that whatever Ronan had done, or failed to do, was easily corrected, but he was sure that it must be corrected. The only reason Ronan was allowed to stay at Monmouth Manufacturing was because his grades were acceptable. "Whatever it is. Don’t let him be right."

Ronan said, low, just for Gansey, "I want to quit."

"One more year."

"I don’t want to do this for another year." He kicked a piece of gravel under the Camaro. Now his voice did rise, but only in ferocity, not in volume. "Another year, and then I get strangled with a necktie like Declan? I’m not a damn politician, Gansey. I’m not a banker."

Gansey wasn’t, either, but it didn’t mean he wanted to leave school. The pain in Ronan’s voice meant he couldn’t have any in his when he said, "Just graduate, and do whatever you want."

The trust funds from their fathers had ensured that neither of them had to work for a living, ever, if they didn’t choose to. They were extraneous parts in the machine that was society, a fact that sat differently on Ronan’s shoulders than Gansey’s.

Ronan looked angry, but he was in the mood where he was going to look angry no matter what. "I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what the hell I am."

He got into the Camaro.

"You promised me," Gansey said through the open car door.

Ronan didn’t look up. "I know what I did, Gansey."

"Don’t forget."

When Ronan slammed the door, it echoed across the parking lot in the too-loud way of sounds after dark. Gansey joined Adam at his safely distant vantage point. In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in control. From somewhere, he had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo, and he bounced it with a pensive expression.

"I convinced them not to call the cops," Adam said. He was good at making things quiet.

Gansey let out his breath. Tonight, he didn’t have it in him to talk to the police on Ronan’s behalf.

Tell me I’m doing the right thing with Ronan. Tell me this is how to find the old Ronan. Tell me I’m not ruining him by keeping him away from Declan.

But Adam had already told Gansey he thought Ronan needed to learn to clean up his own messes. It was only Gansey who seemed afraid that Ronan would learn to live in the dirt.

So he merely asked, "Where’s Noah?"

"He’s coming. I think he was leaving a tip." Adam dropped the ball and caught it again. He had an almost mechanical way of snapping his fingers around the ball as it bounced back toward him; one moment his hand was open and empty, and the next, tight shut around it.

Bounce. Snap.

Gansey said, "So, Ashley."

"Yes," Adam replied, as if he’d been waiting for him to bring her up.

"Quite some eyes on her." It was an expression his dad used all the time, a family catchphrase for someone nosy.

Adam asked, "Do you think she’s really here for Declan?"

"Why else would she be here?"

"Glendower," Adam replied immediately.

Gansey laughed, but Adam didn’t. "Really, why else?"

Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the rubber ball. He’d chosen his trajectory carefully: The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck one of the Camaro’s tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing in the black. He stepped forward in time for it to slap in his palm. Gansey made an approving noise.

Adam said, "I don’t think you should talk to people about it anymore."

"It’s not a secret."

"Maybe it should be."

Adam’s uneasiness was contagious, but logically, there was nothing to support suspicion. For four years, Gansey had been searching for Glendower, freely admitting this fact to all and any who showed interest, and he’d never seen the slightest evidence of anyone else sharing his precise quest. He had to admit, however, that the suggestion of that possibility gave him a peculiarly unpleasant feeling.

He said, "It’s all out there, Adam. Pretty much everything I’ve done is public record. It’s too late for it to be a secret. It was too late years ago."

"Come on, Gansey," Adam said with some heat. "Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel …?"

"Feel what?" Gansey despised fighting with Adam, and somehow this felt like a fight.

Unsuccessfully, Adam struggled to put his thoughts into words. Finally, he replied: "Observed."

Across the parking lot, Noah had finally emerged from Nino’s and he slouched toward them. In the Camaro, Ronan’s silhouetted form lay back in the seat, head tilted as if he slept. Close by, Gansey could smell roses and grass mowed for the first time that year, and farther away, he smelled damp earth coming to life beneath last year’s fallen leaves, and water running over rocks in mountain crooks where humans never walked. Perhaps Adam was right. There was something pregnant about the night, he thought, something out of sight opening its eyes.

This time, when Adam dropped the ball, it was Gansey’s hand that reached out to snap it up.

"Do you think there would be any point to someone spying on us," Gansey said, "if we weren’t on the right track?"


	10. Chapter 10

By the time Blue made her slow way outside, weariness had extinguished her anxiety. She sucked in a huge breath of the cool night air. It didn’t even seem like it could be the same substance that filtered through Nino’s air-conditioning vents.

As Blue waited to be picked up, she could hear from across the parking lot, muffled conversations faded in and out. Footsteps scuffed across the asphalt somewhere close behind her. Even when they were quiet, people really were the noisiest animals.

One day, she would live someplace where she could stand outside her house, where she could escape the noisiness of people. Then she could enjoy the serene, quiet of the night. Without people, or the buzzing of streetlamps, and no Raven boys.

"Excuse me, um, miss — hi."

Dammit. The voice was careful, masculine, and local; the vowels had all the edges sanded off. Blue turned with a lukewarm expression.

To her surprise, it was President Cell Phone’s embarrassed friend. He was alone. No sign of President Cell Phone or their hostile friend. Or their mysterious fourth friend. _Right! I forgot to ask Mom about that when she called_. His _aura_ outlined an uncertain posture, which didn’t quite track with the raven-breasted sweater Aglionby boys wore.

"Hi," Blue said, softer than she would’ve if she hadn’t noticed the fray. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy that was this shy and embarrassed. "Adam, is it?"

He gave a jerky, abashed nod before stating a yes. Blue heard the sound of a bike, so that’s what one of Adam’s hands was resting on it. She didn’t know what sort of Aglionby boy rode a bicycle instead of driving a car, either.

"I was on my way home," Adam said, "And I thought I recognized you over here. I wanted to say sorry. About what happened earlier. I didn’t tell him to do that and I wanted you to know."

It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. Blue _watched_ as he glanced over his shoulder, then, at the sound of a car on a side street. When he looked back to her, he still seemed wary like it was a normal for him. This Aglionby boy isn’t often happy, she thought.

"Well, that’s nice of you," she said. "But it’s not you that needed to apologize."

Adam said, "I can’t let him take all the blame. I mean, he was right. I did want to talk to you. But I didn’t want to just — try to pick you up."

This was where she ought to brush him off. But she was stymied by his embarrassment at the table; his sincerity. He was just strange enough that she wanted to keep _looking_ at it. His _aura_ was pleasant, not a dull _orange_ but a vibrant one that hinted at something _more_.

Blue asked, "And what is it you wanted to do?"

"Talk," he said. In his local accent, it was a long word and it seemed less of a synonym for speak than it was for confess. He added, "I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble."

Blue was about to tell him how Orla’s ideas got everyone into trouble at her house, too, but then she realized he would say something else and then she would reply, and it could go on all night. Something about Adam told her that this was a boy she could have a conversation with.

She was, as Neeve pointed out, a sensible girl. _I’ll take care of it_. She blew out a breath.

"It wasn’t about what he was saying about you, anyway. It was that he offered me money," she said, tightening her grip on her cane. The thing was not to imagine what it would’ve been like to stay and talk. When Blue didn’t have enough money for something, the worst thing in the world was to imagine what it would’ve been like to have whatever the something was.

Adam sighed, as if he recognized her retreat. "He doesn’t know. He’s stupid about money."

"And you aren’t?"

Blue _saw_ him level her with a very steady look. It wasn’t an expression that left room for folly. _A sensitive subject for the both of us it seems._

Blue tipped her head back, staring up. It was strange to imagine how stars wheeled across the sky: a vast movement too far away for her to detect. Leo, Leo Minor, Orion’s Belt. If she had been her mother or her aunts or her cousins, capable of seeing and scrying up through the heavens, would she see what she ought to say to Adam?

She asked, "Are you coming back to Nino’s?"

"Am I invited?"

She smiled in reply. It felt like a very dangerous thing, that smile, like something Maura wouldn’t be pleased with.

Blue had two rules: Stay away from boys, because they’re trouble, and stay away from Raven boys, because they were bastards.

But those rules didn’t seem to apply to Adam. Heart thumping, she said to him,

“I’m Blue Sargent. You’re welcome back to have a conversation anytime.”

Adam said only, "I’m glad I came back." Turning his long self around, he began to push his dolefully squeaking bike back the way he’d come.

Blue pressed her fingers to her face. _Am I seriously trying to be friends with a Raven boy?_

Blue jumped when the rear door of the restaurant cracked open. But it was only Donny, judging by his _aura_.

Donny asked, "Do you know who left this book behind? Is it yours?"

Meeting him halfway across the lot, Blue accepted the journal and _sensed_ that it belonged to President Cell Phone. The journal held the _essence_ of that archetypical Raven boy.

"I didn’t really read it," Donny said. "I just wanted to see if there was a name in there to return it. But then I saw that it was — well, it’s your stuff."

By this, he meant it was what he expected of a psychic’s daughter.

"I think I know who it belongs to," Blue said. "I’ll take it."

After Donny had returned inside the restaurant, she had time to marvel at the sheer density of the leather journal. Even if the content hadn’t been something she could see, the feel of the thing would have. There were so many of the clippings she’d noticed before that the journal wouldn’t stay book-shaped unless tied shut with leather wrappings. Pages and pages were devoted to these ripped and scissored excerpts, and there was an undeniable tactile pleasure to browsing. Blue ran her fingers over the varied surfaces. Creamy, thick artist paper, thin paper, slick utilitarian stock, and ragged-edged paper. More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.

Blue could feel the impression of a pen on the paper and her fingers traced what was written or drawn. A familiar shape stood out from the rest of the doodles. Three intersecting lines: a long, beaked triangle. It was the same shape she had drawn in the churchyard dust. The same shape her mother had drawn on the steamed shower door, according to Neeve.

Maura honked the horn of the car as she pulled up to Blue. She exited the car and helped Blue into the passenger seat. Before Maura drove off, Blue showed her Mom the journal and asked what it was about.

It took her a while to make sense of what the journal was really about. It was organized into rough sections, but it was clear that whoever had created it had run out of space in some and begun anew later in the journal. There was a section on ley lines, invisible energy lines that connected spiritual places. There was a section on Owain Glyndr, the Raven King. There was a section about legends of sleeping knights who waited beneath mountains for discovery and new life. There was a section of strange stories about sacrificed kings and ancient water goddesses and all of the old things that ravens represented.

Maura flattened the page to get a better look at a certain section. She read about ley lines: "mystical energy roads that connect spiritual places." Stating that throughout the journal, the writer had doodled the three lines again and again, along with a sickly-looking Stonehenge, strangely elongated horses, and a labeled sketch of a burial mound. There was no explanation of the symbol.

It couldn’t be a coincidence, they both thought.

Maura gave back the journal to Blue and drove them home, both pondering in silence over the new knowledge they learned.

Adam and President Cell Phone gave her the same sensation as the journal did: the sense of magic, of possibility, of anxious danger. That same feeling as when that first spirit touched her hair.

Blue’s thoughts changed to those about Gansey. Impressions of guilt weighed in her chest because whoever Gansey was, he didn’t have long to live.


	11. Chapter 11

Gansey woke in the night to find the moon full on his face and his phone ringing.

He fumbled for where it was nestled in the blankets beside him. Blind without his glasses or contacts, he had to hold the screen an inch from his eyes to read the caller ID: MALORY, R. Now Gansey understood the bizarre timing of the call. Dr. Roger Malory lived in Sussex, a five-hour time difference from Henrietta. Midnight in Virginia was five in the morning for Malory-the-early-riser. Malory was one of the prime authorities on British ley lines. He was either eighty or one hundred or two hundred years old and had written three books on the subject, all classics in the (very limited) field. They’d met the summer Gansey was splitting his time between Wales and London. Malory had been the first one to take fifteen-year-old Gansey seriously, a favor for which Gansey would not soon stop being grateful for.

"Gansey," Malory said warmly, knowing better than to call him by his Christian name. Without further preamble, Malory launched into a one-sided conversation about the weather, the historical society’s past four meetings, and how frustrating his neighbor with the collie was. Gansey understood about three quarters of the monologue. After living in the UK for nearly a year, Gansey was good with accents, but Malory’s was often difficult, due to a combination of slurring, chewing, extreme age, bad breeding, and a poor phone connection.

Getting out of bed to crouch beside his model of Henrietta, Gansey half-listened for a polite twelve minutes before breaking in, gently. "It’s nice of you to call."

"I found a very interesting textual source," Malory said. There was a sound like he was either chewing or wrapping something in cellophane. Gansey had seen his flat and it was quite possible he was doing both. "Who suggested that the ley lines are dormant. Sleeping. Sound familiar?"

"Like Glendower! So what does that mean?"

"Might explain why they’re so hard to dowse. If they’re still present but not active, the energy would be very faint and irregular. In Surrey, I was following a line with this fellow — fourteen miles, rotten weather, raindrops like turnips — and then it just disappeared."

Retrieving a tube of glue and some cardboard shingles, Gansey used the strong moonlight to work on a roof while Malory went on about rain. He asked, "Did your source say anything about waking the ley lines up? If Glendower can be woken, the ley lines could be, too, right?"

"That’s the thought."

"But all it takes to wake Glendower is discovery. People have been walking all over the ley lines."

"Oh no, Mr. Gansey, that’s where you’re mistaken. The spirit roads are underground. Even if they weren’t always, they’re now covered by meters of dirt accumulated over the centuries," Malory said. "No one’s really touched them for hundreds of years. You and I, we don’t walk the lines. We just follow the echoes."

Gansey recalled how the trail had seemed to come and go for no reason while he and Adam dowsed the lines. Malory’s theory had a ring of plausibility, and, really, that was all he needed. He wanted nothing more than to start scouring his books for further support for this new idea, school day be damned. He felt a rare stab of resentment at being a teen, being tied to Aglionby; maybe this was how Ronan felt all the time.

"Okay. So we go to them underground. Caves, maybe?"

"Oh, caves are dreadful things," Malory replied. "Do you know how many people die in caves every year?"

Gansey replied that he was sure he didn’t.

"Thousands," Malory assured him. "They are like elephant graveyards. Much better to stay aboveground. Spelunking is more dangerous than motorcycle racing. No, this source was all about a ritual way to wake the spirit roads from the surface, letting the ley line know of your presence. You’d do a symbolic laying of hands on the energy there in Marianna."

"Henrietta."

"Texas?"

Whenever Gansey talked to British people about America, they always seemed to think he meant Texas. He said, "Virginia."

"Right," agreed Malory warmly. "Think how easy it would be to follow that spirit road to Glendower if it’s shouting loud instead of whispering. You find it, perform the ritual, follow it to your king."

When Malory said it, it sounded inevitable.

Follow it to your king.

Gansey closed his eyes to calm his pulse. He saw a dimly gray image of a king in repose, hands folded on his chest, a sword by his right side, a cup by his left. This slumbering figure was dizzyingly important to Gansey in a way that he couldn’t begin to understand or shape. It was something more, something bigger, something that mattered. Something without a price tag. Something earned.

"Now, the text was not quite clear on how to perform the ritual," Malory admitted. He rambled about the vagaries of historical documents, and Gansey only paid a little attention until he finished with, "I’m going to try it on the Lockyer road. I’ll let you know how it goes."

"Brilliant," Gansey said. "I can’t say thanks enough."

"Give my regards to your mother."

"I wi —"

"You’re lucky you still have your mother at your age. When I was about your age, my mother was murdered by the British health-care system. She was perfectly fine until she was admitted after a little cough…."

Gansey half-listened to Malory’s oft-repeated story of the government’s failure to cure his mother’s throat cancer. Malory sounded quite cheerful by the time the phone had gone silent.

Now Gansey felt infected by the chase; he needed to talk to someone before the unfinished feeling of the quest ate him from the inside out. Adam would be the best, but the odds were good that Ronan, who swung wildly between insomnia and hyper-somnia, would be awake.

He’d only made it halfway to Ronan’s room before the thought struck him that it was empty. Standing in the dark doorway, Gansey whispered Ronan’s name, and then, when that got no response, spoke it aloud.

Ronan’s room was not to be broached, but Gansey did it anyway. Putting his hand on the bed, he found it unmade and cool, the blankets thrown aside with the speed of Ronan’s going. Gansey hammered Noah’s closed door with a fist while fumbling to dial Ronan’s number with his other hand. It rang twice before Ronan’s voicemail said merely, "Ronan Lynch."

Gansey cut off the recorded voice mid-word, his pulse tripping. For a long moment he debated, and then he dialed another number. This time, it was Adam’s voice that answered, low with sleep and caution. "Gansey?"

"Ronan’s gone."

Adam was quiet. It was not just that Ronan had vanished, it was that he had vanished after a fight with Declan. But it wasn’t an easy thing to leave the Parrish household in the middle of the night. The consequences of getting caught could leave physical evidence, and it was getting too warm for long sleeves. Gansey felt wretched for asking this of him.

Outside, a midnight bird cried, high and piercing. The little replica of Henrietta was eerie in the half-light, the die-cast cars parked on the streets appearing as though they had just paused. Gansey always thought that, after dark, it felt like anything could happen. At night, Henrietta felt like magic, and at night, magic felt like it might be a terrible thing.

"I’ll check the park," Adam whispered finally. "And, uh, the bridge, I guess."

Adam hung up so softly that it took Gansey a moment to realize the connection had ended. He pressed his fingertips to his eyes, which was how Noah found him.

"You’re going to look for him?" Noah asked. He looked pale and insubstantial in the yellow, late-night light of the room behind him; the skin beneath his eyes was darker than anything. He looked less like Noah than the suggestion of Noah. "Check the church."

Noah didn’t say he would go along, and Gansey didn’t ask him to. Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterward, and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.

Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.

Pulling on his jacket, he headed out into the greenish light of the chilly parking lot. The hood of Ronan’s BMW was cold, so it hadn’t been driven recently. Wherever he’d gone, he’d gone on foot. The church, its spire illuminated by dusky yellow light, was within walking distance. So was Nino’s. So was the old bridge with the fast-current rushing away beneath it.

He started to walk. His mind was logical, but his traitorous heart stuttered from beat to beat. He wasn’t naive; he carried no illusions that he’d ever recover the Ronan Lynch he’d known before Niall died. But he didn’t want to lose the Ronan Lynch he had now.

Despite the strong moonlight, the entrance to St. Agnes lay in total darkness. Shivering a bit, Gansey put his hand on the great iron ring that pulled open the church door, unsure if it would be unlocked. He’d only been to St. Agnes once, on Easter, because Ronan’s younger brother, Matthew, had asked them all to come. He wouldn’t have thought of it as a place someone like Ronan would go in the middle of the night, but then again, he wouldn’t have pegged Ronan as a churchgoer at all. And yet all of the Lynch brothers went to St. Agnes every Sunday. For an hour, they managed to sit next to one another in a pew even when they couldn’t meet one another’s eyes over a restaurant table.

Stepping through the black arch of the entrance, Gansey thought, Noah is good at finding things. He hoped that Noah was right about Ronan.

The church enveloped Gansey in an incense-scented pocket of air, a rare enough smell that it instantly evoked half a dozen memories of family weddings, funerals, and baptisms, every one of them summer. How strange that a season should be held captive in one breath of trapped air.

"Ronan?" The word was sucked into the empty space. It echoed off the unseeable ceiling far overhead, so it was only his own voice, in the end, that answered him.

The subdued aisle light made peaked shadows of arches. The darkness and uncertainty crushed Gansey’s ribs as small as a fist, his breathless lungs reminding him of yet another long-ago summer day, the afternoon he first realized there was such a thing as magic in the world.

And there Ronan was, stretched out on one of the shadowed pews, an arm hanging off the edge, the other skewed above his head, his body a darker bit of black in an already black world. He wasn’t moving.

Gansey thought, Not tonight. Please don’t let it be tonight.

Edging into the pew behind Ronan, he put his hand on the other boy’s shoulder, as if he could merely wake him, praying that by assuming it so, it would be true. The shoulder was warm below his hand; he smelled alcohol.

"Wake up, dude," he said. The words didn’t sound light, though he meant them to.

Ronan’s shoulder shifted and his face turned. For a brief, unchained moment, Gansey had a sudden thought that he was too late, and Ronan was dead after all, and that his corpse woke now only because Gansey had commanded it to. But then Ronan’s brilliant blue eyes opened, and the moment dissipated.

Gansey let out a sigh. "You bastard."

Ronan said plainly, "I couldn’t dream." Then, taking in Gansey’s stricken expression, he added, "I promised you it wouldn’t happen again."

Gansey tried again to keep his voice light but failed. "But you’re a liar."

"I think," Ronan replied, "that you’re mistaking me for my brother."

The church was quiet and full around them; it seemed brighter now that Ronan’s eyes were open, as if the building had been asleep as well.

"When I told you I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you drunk somewhere else."

Ronan, with only a little slurring, replied, "Pot calling the kettle black."

With dignity, Gansey said, "I drink. I do not get drunk."

Ronan’s eyes dropped to something he held near his chest.

"What is that?" Gansey asked.

Next to his chest, Ronan’s fingers curled around a dark object. When Gansey reached down to uncurl his grip, he felt something warm and living, a rapid pulse against his fingertips. He snatched his hand away.

"Christ," said Gansey, trying to make sense of what he’d felt. "Is that a bird?"

Ronan slowly sat up, still holding his cargo close. Another whiff of alcohol-laced breath drifted toward Gansey.

"Raven." There was a long pause as Ronan regarded his hand. "Maybe a crow. But I doubt it. I … yeah, seriously doubt it. Corvus corax."

Even drunk, Ronan knew the Latin name for the common raven.

And it was not just a raven, Gansey saw. It was a tiny foundling, featherless mouth still a baby’s smile, wings still days and nights and days away from flight. He wasn’t sure he would want to touch something that looked so easily destroyable.

The raven was Glendower’s bird. The Raven King, he was called, from a long line of kings associated with the bird. Legend had it that Glendower could speak to ravens, and vice versa. It was only one of the reasons why Gansey was here in Henrietta, a town known for its ravens. His skin prickled.

"Where did it come from?"

Ronan’s fingers were a compassionate cage around the raven’s breast. It didn’t look real in his hands. "I found it."

"People find pennies," Gansey replied. "Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers."

"And ravens," Ronan said. "You’re just jealous ’cause" — at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts — "you didn’t find one, too."

The bird had just crapped between Ronan’s fingers onto the pew beside him. Holding the fledgling in one hand, Ronan used a church bulletin to scrape the majority of the mess off the wood. He offered the soiled paper to Gansey. The weekly prayer requests were spattered with white.

Gansey only took the paper because he didn’t trust Ronan to bother finding a place to throw it out. With some distaste, he asked, "What if I implement a no-pets policy at the apartment?"

"Well, hell, man," Ronan replied, with a savage smile, "you can’t just throw out Noah like that."

It took Gansey a moment to realize that Ronan had made a joke, and by then, it was too late to laugh. In any case, he knew he was going to let the bird return with them to Monmouth Manufacturing, because he saw the possessive way Ronan held it. Already the raven looked up at him, beak cracked hopefully, dependent.

Gansey relented. "Come on. We’re going back. Get up."

As Ronan unsteadily climbed to his feet, the raven hunched down in his hands, becoming all beak and body, no neck. He said, "Get used to some turbulence, you little bastard."

"You can’t name it that."

"Her name’s Chainsaw," replied Ronan, without looking up. Then: "Noah. You’re creepy as hell back there."

In the deep, shadowed entrance of the church, Noah stood silently. For a second, all that seemed to be visible was his pale face; his dark clothing invisible and his eyes chasms into someplace unknowable. Then he stepped into the light and he was rumpled and familiar as always.

"I thought you weren’t coming," Gansey said.

Noah’s gaze traveled past them to the altar, then up to the dark, unseeable ceiling. He said, with typical bravery, "The apartment was creepy."

"Freak," Ronan remarked, but Noah seemed unconcerned.

Gansey pulled open the door to the sidewalk. No sign of Adam. Guilt for calling him out for a false alarm was beginning to settle in. Though … he wasn’t entirely certain it was a false alarm. Something had happened, even if he wasn’t yet sure what. "Where did you say you found that bird again?"

"In my head." Ronan’s laugh was a sharp jackal cry.

"Dangerous place," commented Noah.

Ronan stumbled, all his edges blunted by alcohol, and the raven in his hands let out a feeble sound more percussive than vocal. He replied, "Not for a chain saw."

Back out in the hard spring night, Gansey tipped his head back. Now that he knew that Ronan was all right, he could see that Henrietta after dark was a beautiful place, a patchwork town embroidered with black tree branches.

A raven, of all the birds for Ronan to turn up with.

Gansey didn’t believe in coincidences.


	12. Chapter 12

Whelk was not sleeping.

Back when he was an Aglionby boy, sleep had come easy — and why shouldn’t it have? Like Czerny and the rest of his classmates, he slept two or four or six hours on weekdays, up late, up early, and then performed marathon sleeping sessions on the weekend. And when he did sleep, it was hours of easy, dreamless sleep. No — he knew that was false. Everyone dreamed, only some forgot.

Now, however, he rarely closed his eyes for longer than a few hours at a stretch. He rolled in his bedsheets. He sat bolt upright, woken by whispers. He nodded off on his leather couch, the only piece of furniture the government hadn’t seized. His sleep patterns and energy seemed dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself, ebbing and flowing like an uneven tide. Attempts to chart it left him frustrated: He seemed more wakeful at the full moon and after thunderstorms, but beyond that, it was difficult to predict. In his mind, he imagined that it was the magnetic pulse of the ley line itself, somehow invited into his body through Czerny’s death.

Sleep deprivation made his life an imaginary thing, his days a ribbon floating aimlessly in water.

It was nearly a full moon and it had not been long since it rained, so Whelk was awake.

He sat in a T-shirt and boxers in front of the computer screen, operating the mouse with the unprincipled and dubious productivity of the fatigued. All in a rush, the countless voices invaded his head, whispering and hissing. They sounded like the static that buzzed over phone lines in the vicinity of the ley line. Like the wind before a storm front. Like the trees themselves conspiring. As always, Whelk couldn’t pick out any words, and he couldn’t understand the conversation. But he did understand one thing: Something strange had just happened in Henrietta, and the voices couldn’t stop talking about it.

For the first time in years, Whelk retrieved his old county maps from his tiny hall closet. He had no table and the counter-top was cluttered with opened packages of microwave lasagna and plates with stale bread crusts on them, so he spread the maps out in the bathroom instead. A spider in the bathtub skidded out of his way when he flattened a map against the surface.

Czerny, you’re in a better place than me, I think.

But he didn’t really believe that. He had no idea what had become of Czerny’s soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call what had been Czerny, but if Whelk had been cursed with whispering voices merely by his part in the ritual, Czerny’s fate must’ve been worse.

Whelk stood back and crossed his arms, studying the dozens of marks and notations he’d made on the maps over the course of his search. Czerny’s impossible handwriting, always in red, noted energy levels along the possible path of the ley line. Back then, it had been a game, a treasure hunt. A play for glory. Was it true? It didn’t matter. It was an expensive exercise in strategy with the East Coast as the playing field. Looking for patterns, Whelk had painstakingly drawn circles around areas of interest on one of the topographical maps. A circle around an old copse of ash trees where the energy levels were always high. A circle around a ruined church that wildlife seemed to avoid. A circle around the place Czerny had died.

Of course, he had drawn the circle before Czerny had died. The place, a sinister group of oak trees, had been notable because of old words carved into one of the trunks. Latin. It seemed incomplete, difficult to translate, and Whelk’s best guess was "the second road." The energy levels were promising there, though, if inconsistent. Surely this, then, was on the ley line.

Czerny and Whelk had returned a half-dozen times, taking readings (next to the circle, there were six different numbers in Czerny’s handwriting), digging in the dirt for possible artifacts, watching overnight for signs of supernatural activity. Whelk had constructed his most complicated and sensitive dowsing rod yet, two metal wires bent at a ninety-degree angle and inserted into a metal tube handle so that they could swing freely. They’d dowsed the area around it, trying to establish for certain the path of the line.

But it remained spotty, coming in and out of focus like a distant radio station. The lines needed to be woken, to have their frequencies honed, the volume turned up. Czerny and Whelk made plans to attempt the ritual in the oak grove. They weren’t quite sure of the process, though. All Whelk could find out was that the line loved reciprocity and sacrifice, but that was frustratingly vague. No other information presented itself, so they kept pushing it off. Over winter break. Spring break. End of the school year.

Then Whelk’s mother had called and told Whelk that his father had been arrested for unethical business practices and income tax evasion. It turned out the company had been trading with war criminals, a fact his mother knew and Whelk had guessed, and the FBI had been watching for years. Overnight, the Whelks lost everything.

It was in the papers the next day, the catastrophic crash of the Whelk family fortune. Both of Whelk’s girlfriends left him. Well, the second one was technically Czerny’s, so perhaps that didn’t count. The whole thing was all very public. The Virginia playboy, heir to the Whelk fortune, suddenly evicted from his Aglionby dorm, relieved of his social life, freed from any hope of his Ivy League future, watching his car being loaded onto a truck and his room emptied of speakers and furniture.

The last time Whelk had looked at this map had been as he stood in his dorm room, realizing that the only thing he had left was the ten-dollar bill in his pocket. None of his credit cards meant anything anymore.

Czerny had pulled up in his red Mustang. He hadn’t gotten out of the car.

"Does this make you white trash now?" he’d asked. Czerny didn’t really have a sense of humor. He just sometimes said things that happened to be funny. Whelk, standing in the wreckage of his life, didn’t laugh this time.

The ley line wasn’t a game anymore.

"Unlock your door," Whelk had told him. "We’re doing the ritual."


	13. Chapter 13

Blue was up before her alarm clock was supposed to go off for school, she was woken by the front door closing. She tried not to resent her loss of more sleep.

Footsteps started up the staircase. Blue caught the sound of her mother’s voice.

"… was up waiting for you."

"Some things are better done at night." This was Neeve. Though her voice was smaller than Maura’s, it was crisper, somehow, and carried well. "Henrietta is quite a place, isn’t it?"

"I didn’t ask you to look at Henrietta," Maura replied, in a stage whisper. She sounded — protective.

"It is difficult not to. It shouts," Neeve said. Her next words were lost in the sound of a creaking stair.

Maura’s reply was obscured as she, too, started to climb the stairs, but it sounded like, "I would prefer if you left Blue out of this."

Blue went very still.

Neeve said, "I’m only telling you what I’m finding. If he vanished at the same time that … possible they’re linked. Do you not want her to know who he is?"

Another stair groaned. Blue thought, Why can’t they talk without creaking up the stairs at the same time!

Maura snapped, "I don’t see how that would be easier for anyone."

Neeve murmured a reply.

"This is already getting out of hand," her mother said. "It was barely more than typing his name into a search engine, and now …"

Blue strained her ears. It felt like she hadn’t heard her mother use a masculine pronoun for quite a long time, with the exception of Gansey.

It was possible, Blue thought after a long moment, that Maura meant Blue’s father. None of the awkward conversations Blue had attempted with her mother had ever gotten her any information about him, just nonsensical humorous replies (He is Santa Claus. He was a bank robber. He’s currently in orbit.) that changed every time she asked. In Blue’s head, he was a dashing heroic figure who’d had to vanish because of a tragic past. Possibly to a witness protection program. She liked to imagine him stealing a glimpse of her over the backyard fence, proudly watching his blind daughter daydream under the beech tree.

Blue was awfully fond of her father, considering she’d never met him.

Somewhere in the depths of the house, a door closed, and then there was once more the sort of night-silence that is hard to disturb. After a long moment, Blue reached over to the plastic bin that served as her nightstand and felt for the journal. She rested a hand on the cool leather cover. The surface of it felt like the cool, smooth bark of the beech tree behind the house. As when she touched the beech tree, she felt at once comforted and anxious: reassured and driven to action.

Henrietta is quite a place, Neeve had said. The journal seemed to agree. A place for what, she wasn’t sure.

Blue didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did. It wasn’t her alarm that woke her this time, either. It was a single thought shouted in her brain:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.

Embroiled in the daily routine of getting ready for school, the conversation between Maura and Neeve seemed more commonplace than it had before. But the journal was still as magical. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Blue touched one of the ley lines drawings. They were exactly similar to the drawing she had absent mindedly taken to etching on any surface.

She thought of the quote her mother read: The king sleeps still, under a mountain, and around him is assembled his warriors and his herds and his riches. By his right hand is his cup, filled with possibility. On his breast nestles his sword, waiting, too, to wake. Fortunate is the soul who finds the king and is brave enough to call him to wakefulness, for the king will grant him a favor, as wondrous as can be imagined by a mortal man.

She closed the page she was tracing. The book felt as if there were a larger, terribly curious Blue inside her that was about to bust out of the smaller, more sensible Blue that held her. For a long moment she let the journal rest on her legs, the cover cool against her palms.

A favor.

If she had a favor, what would she ask? To not have to worry about money? To know who her father had been? To travel the world? To see?

The thought rang through her brain again:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.

What will he be like?

Maybe, if she was standing before that sleeping king, she’d ask the king to save Gansey’s life.

"Blue, I hope you’re awake!" Orla screamed from downstairs. Blue needed to leave soon if she was to make the car trip to school on time.

I wish I could just cut class today.

It wasn’t that Blue dreaded high school; it just felt like … a holding pattern. And it wasn’t as if she was bullied; her friends prevented those aiming to joke about her blindness or her family’s occupations. The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could’ve happily had any number of friends. And she had tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was normal. She had school friends but that was vastly different from having friends.

So her family remained her closest friends, school remained a chore, and Blue remained secretly hopeful that, somewhere out there in the world, there were other odd people like her. Even if they didn’t seem to be in Henrietta.

It was possible, she thought, that Adam was also unusual.

"BLUE!" Orla bellowed again. "SCHOOL."

With the journal held fast to her chest, Blue tapped her cane toward the red-painted door at the end of the hall. On her way, she had to pass the frenzy of activity in the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room and the furious battle for the bathroom. The room behind the red door belonged to Persephone, one of Maura’s two best friends. The door was ajar, but still, Blue knocked softly. Persephone was a poor but energetic sleeper; her midnight shouting, and nocturnal leg paddling ensured that she never had to share a room. It also meant that she grabbed sleep when she could; Blue didn’t want to wake her.

Persephone’s tiny, breathy voice said, "It’s available. I mean, open."

Pushing open the door, Blue found Persephone’s _aura_ sitting at the card table beside the window. When Blue asked what Persephone looked like people often started with Persephone’s hair: a long, wavy white-blond mane that fell to the back of her thighs. If they got past her hair, they described her dresses — elaborate, frothy creations or quizzical smocks. And if they made it past that, they were unsettled by her eyes, true mirror black, the pupils hidden in the darkness.

Currently, Persephone held what Blue believed to be a pencil with a strange grip.

"Good morning," Blue said.

"Good morning," Persephone echoed. "It’s too early. My words aren’t working, so I’ll just use as many of the ones that work for you as possible."

She twirled a hand around in a vague sort of way. Blue took this as a sign to find a place to sit.

"Sleep badly?" Blue asked.

"Badly," Persephone echoed again. Then, "Oh, well, that’s not quite true. I’ll have to use my own words after all."

"What are you working on?"

Often, Persephone was working on her eternal PhD thesis, but because it was a process that seemed to require vexed music and frequent snacks, she rarely did it during the morning rush.

"Just a little something," Persephone said sadly. Or perhaps thoughtfully. It was hard to tell the difference, and Blue didn’t like to ask. Persephone had a lover or a husband who was dead or overseas — it was always difficult to know details when it came to Persephone — and she seemed to miss him, or at least to notice that he was gone, which was notable for Persephone. Again, Blue didn’t like to ask. From Maura, Blue had inherited a dislike of watching people cry, so she never liked to steer the conversation in a way that might result in tears.

Persephone tilted her paper up, “I’ve written 3 three times.” She murmured plainly.

"Important things come in threes?" Blue suggested. It was one of Maura’s favorite sayings.

Persephone’s voice was faraway and vague. "Or sevens. That is a lot of vanilla. One wonders if that is a typo."

"One wonders," repeated Blue.

"Blue!" Maura shouted up. "Are you ready yet?"

Blue didn’t reply, because Persephone disliked high-pitched sounds and shouting back seemed to qualify as one. Instead, she said, "I found something. I showed it to Mom, but she hasn’t said anything about it. I think she was really tired and has forgot about it by now. Will you keep it a secret?"

But this was a silly question. Persephone barely told anybody anything even when it wasn’t a secret.

When Blue handed over the journal, Persephone asked, "Should I open it?"

Blue flapped a hand. Yes, and quickly. She fidgeted back and forth on the bed while Persephone paged through.

Finally, Blue asked, "Well?"

"It’s very nice," Persephone said politely.

"It’s not mine."

"Well, I can see that."

"It was left behind at Ni — wait, why do you say that?"

Persephone paged back and forth. Her dainty, child’s voice was soft enough that Blue had to hold her breath to hear it. "This is clearly a boy’s journal. Also, it’s taking him forever to find this thing. You’d have already found it. That and you can’t write with a pen or read these newspapers."

"BLUE!" roared Maura. "I’M NOT SHOUTING AGAIN!"

"What do you think I should do about it?" Blue asked.

"Well," Persephone said. "First, you might find out whose journal it is."

Blue’s shoulders sagged, she already knew whose it was. It was a relentlessly proper answer, and one that she might have expected from Maura or Calla. Of course she knew she had to return it to its rightful owner. But then where would the fun of it go?

Persephone added, "Then I think you’d better find out if it’s true, don’t you?"

That reply was why she came to Persephone. She smiled, took the journal, and headed down stairs to be driven to school.


	14. Chapter 14

Adam wasn’t waiting by the bank of mailboxes in the morning.

The first time that Gansey had come to pick up Adam, he’d driven past the entrance to Adam’s neighborhood. Actually, more properly, he’d used it as a place to turn around and head back the way he’d come. The road was two ruts through a field — even driveway was too lofty a word for it — and it was impossible to believe, at first look, that it led to a single house, much less a collection of them. Once Gansey had found the house, things had gone even more poorly. At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders. For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey "the S.R.F.," where the S stood for Soft, the R stood for Rich, and the F for something else.

Now Adam just met Gansey where the asphalt ended.

But there was no one waiting by the clustered herd of mailboxes now. It was just empty space, and a lot of it. This part of the valley was endlessly flat in comparison to the other side of Henrietta, and somehow this field was always several degrees drier and more colorless than the rest of the valley, like both the major roads and the rain avoided it. Even at eight in the morning, there were no shadows anywhere in the world.

Peering down the desiccated drive, Gansey tried the house phone, but it merely rang. His watch said he had eighteen minutes to make the fifteen-minute drive to school.

He waited. The engine threw the car to and fro as the Pig idled. He watched the gearshift knob rattle. His feet were roasting from proximity to the V-8. The entire cabin was beginning to stink of gasoline.

He called Monmouth Manufacturing. Noah answered, sounding like he’d been woken.

"Noah," Gansey said loudly, to be heard over the engine. Noah had let him leave his journal behind at Nino’s after all, and its absence was surprisingly unsettling. "Do you remember Adam saying he had work after school today?"

On the days that Adam had work, he often rode his bike in so that he’d have it to get to places later.

Noah grunted to the negative.

Sixteen minutes until class.

"Call me if he calls," Gansey said.

"I won’t be here," Noah replied. "I’m almost gone anyway."

Gansey hung up and unsuccessfully tried the house again. Adam’s mother might be there but not answering, but he didn’t really have time to go back into the neighborhood and investigate.

He could cut class.

Gansey tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. "Come on, Adam."

Of all of the places Gansey had attended boarding school — and he’d attended many in his four years of underage wandering — Aglionby Academy was his father’s favorite, which meant it was the most likely to land its student body in the Ivy League. Or the Senate. It also meant, however, that it was the most difficult school Gansey had ever been to. Before Henrietta, he’d made his search for Glendower his primary activity, and school had been a distant second. Gansey was clever enough and he was good at studying if nothing else, so it hadn’t been a problem to skip classes or push homework to the bottom of the list. But at Aglionby, there were no failing grades. If you dropped below a B average, you were out on your ass. And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will.

He’d said it nicely, though, over a plate of fettuccine.

Gansey couldn’t cut class. Not after missing school the day before. That was what it came down to. Fourteen minutes to make a fifteen-minute drive to school, and Adam not waiting.

He felt the old fear creeping slowly out of his lungs.

Don’t panic. You were wrong about Ronan last night. You have to stop this. Death isn’t as close as you think.

Dispirited, Gansey tried the home phone one more time. Nothing. He had to go. Adam must’ve taken his bike, he must’ve had work, he must’ve had errands to run and forgotten to tell him. The rutted drive down to the neighborhood was still empty.

Come on, Adam.

Wiping his palms on his slacks, he put his hands back on the steering wheel and headed for the school.

Gansey didn’t get a chance to see if Adam had made it to Aglionby until third period, when they both had Latin. This was, inexplicably, the only class Ronan never missed. Ronan was head of class in Latin. He studied joylessly but relentlessly, as if his life depended on it. Directly behind him was Adam, Aglionby’s star pupil, otherwise at the top of every class that he took. Like Ronan, Adam studied relentlessly, because his future life did depend on it.

For his part, Gansey preferred French. He told Helen there was very little purpose to a language that couldn’t be used to translate a menu, but really, French was just easier for him to learn; his mother spoke a little. He’d originally resigned himself to taking Latin in order to translate historical texts for Glendower research, but Ronan’s proficiency at the language robbed Gansey’s study of any urgency.

Latin was held in Borden House, a small frame house on the other side of the Aglionby campus from Welch Hall, the main academic building. As Gansey strode hurriedly across the center green, Ronan appeared, knocking Gansey’s arm. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

Ronan hissed, "Where’s Parrish?"

"He didn’t come in with me today," Gansey said, mood sinking. Ronan and Adam shared second period. "You haven’t seen him yet?"

"Wasn’t in class."

Behind Gansey, someone punched his shoulder blade and said, Gansey boy! as they trotted by. Gansey halfheartedly lifted three fingers, the signal of the rowing team.

"I tried calling him at the house," he said.

Ronan replied, "Well, Poor Boy needs a cell."

A few months earlier, Gansey had offered to buy Adam a cell phone, and by so doing had launched the longest fight they’d ever had, a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive than either of them could accomplish.

"Lynch!"

Gansey looked in the direction of the voice; Ronan didn’t. The owner of the voice was halfway across the green, difficult to identify in the homogenous Aglionby uniform.

"Lynch!" the call came again. "I’m going to fuck you up."

Ronan still didn’t look up. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and continued stalking across the grass.

"What’s that about?" Gansey demanded.

"Some people don’t take losing very well," Ronan replied.

"Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again."

"Don’t ask me, then."

Gansey contemplated if he could give Ronan a curfew. Or if he should quit rowing to spend more time with him on Fridays — he knew that was when Ronan got into trouble with the BMW. Maybe he could convince Ronan to …

Ronan adjusted the strap on his shoulder again, and this time, Gansey took a closer look at it. The bag it belonged to was distinctly larger than his usual, and he handled it gingerly, as if it might spill.

Gansey asked, "Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you."

"She has to be fed every two hours."

"How do you know?"

"Jesus, the Internet, Gansey." Ronan pulled open the door to Borden House; as soon as they breached the threshold, everything within sight was covered with navy blue carpet.

"If you get caught with that thing —" But Gansey couldn’t think of a suitable threat. What was the punishment for smuggling a live bird into classes? He wasn’t certain there was precedent. He finished, instead, "If it dies in your bag, I forbid you to throw it out in a classroom."

"She," Ronan corrected. "It’s a she."

"I’d buy that if it had any defining sexual characteristics. It had better not have bird flu or something." But he wasn’t thinking about Ronan’s raven. He was thinking about Adam not being in class.

Ronan and Gansey took their usual seats in the back of the navy-carpeted classroom. At the front of the room, Whelk was writing verbs on the board.

When Gansey and Ronan had come in, Whelk had stopped writing mid-word: internec — Though there was no reason to think Whelk cared about their conversation, Gansey had the strange idea that the lifted piece of chalk in Whelk’s hand was because of them, that the Latin teacher had stopped writing merely to listen in. Adam’s suspicion really was beginning to rub off on him.

Ronan caught Whelk’s eye and held it in an unfriendly sort of way. Despite his interest in Latin, Ronan had declared their Latin teacher a socially awkward shitbird earlier in the year and further clarified that he didn’t like him. Because he despised everyone, Ronan wasn’t a good judge of character, but Gansey had to agree that there was something discomfiting about Whelk. A few times, Gansey had tried to hold a conversation with him about Roman history, knowing full well the effect an enthusiastic academic conversation could have on an otherwise listless grade. But Whelk was too young to be a mentor and too old to be a peer, and Gansey couldn’t find an angle.

Ronan kept staring at Whelk. He was good at staring. There was something about his stare that took something from the other person.

The Latin teacher flicked his glance awkwardly away from them. Having dealt with Whelk’s curiosity, Ronan asked, "What are you going to do about Parrish?"

"I guess I’m going to go by there after class. Right?"

"He’s probably sick."

They looked at each other. We’re already making excuses for him, Gansey thought.

Ronan peered inside his bag again. In the darkness, Gansey just caught a glimpse of the raven’s beak. Usually, Gansey would’ve basked once more in the odds of Ronan of finding a raven, but at the moment, with Adam missing, his quest didn’t feel like magic; it felt like years spent piecing together coincidences, and all he had made from it was a strange cloth — too heavy to carry, too light to do any good at all.

"Mr. Gansey, Mr. Lynch?"

Whelk had managed to suddenly manifest beside their desks. Both boys looked up at him. Gansey, polite. Ronan, hostile.

"You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr. Lynch," Whelk said.

"You know what they say about men with large bags," Ronan replied. "Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?"

Gansey had no idea what Ronan had just said, but he was certain from Ronan’s smirk that it wasn’t entirely polite.

Whelk’s expression confirmed Gansey’s suspicion, but he merely rapped on Ronan’s desk with his knuckles and moved off.

"Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A," Gansey said.

Ronan’s smile was golden. "It was last year."

At the front of the room, Whelk began class.

Adam never showed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?
> 
> "You show yours and I show mine"


	15. Chapter 15

"Mom, why is Neeve here?" Blue asked.

Watching her mother stand on the kitchen table. The moment she’d come back from school, Maura had enlisted her help for changing the bulbs in the supposedly badly designed stained-glass creation that hung over the table. The complicated process required at least three hands and tended to be left until most of the bulbs had burned out. Blue hadn’t minded helping despite never needing the lights. She needed something to keep her mind off Gansey’s looming appointment.

"She’s family," Maura replied grimly. She savagely gripped the fixture’s chain as she wrestled with a stubborn bulb.

"Family that comes home in the middle of the night?"

Maura shot Blue a dark look. "You were born with larger ears than I remember. She’s just helping me look for something while she’s here."

The front door opened. Neither of them thought anything of it, as both Calla and Persephone were about the house somewhere. Calla was less likely, as she was an irascible, sedentary creature of habit, but Persephone tended to get caught in odd drafts and blow around.

Adjusting her grip on the stained glass, Blue asked, "What sort of something?"

"Blue."

"What sort of something?"

"A someone," Maura said, finally.

"What sort of someone?"

But before her mother had time to reply, they heard a man’s voice:

"That is a strange way to run a business."

They both turned slowly. Blue’s arms had been lifted carrying the boxes of bulbs for so long they felt rubbery when she lowered them. The owner of the voice stood in the doorway to the front hall, his hands in his pockets. He did not sound old, maybe mid-twenties. Maura whispered a rushed description of a man with a shock of black hair and how all of his facial features seemed just a little too large for his face.

"And that," her mother said, releasing the beleaguered light fixture, "is a very strange way to enter someone’s home."

"I’m sorry," the young man said. "There is a sign out front saying this is a place of business."

There was indeed a sign out front, hand-painted — though Blue didn’t know by whose hand — that read PSYCHIC. And, beneath that:

"By appointment only," Maura told the man. She grimaced into the kitchen.

The man said, "Well then, I’d like to make an appointment."

A voice from the doorway to the stairs made all three of them turn.

"We could do a triple reading for you," Persephone said.

She stood at the base of the stairs, small and pale and made largely of hair. The man stared at her, though Blue wasn’t certain if this was because he was considering Persephone’s proposal or because Persephone was quite a lot to take in at first glance.

"What," the man asked finally, "is that?"

It took Blue a moment to realize that he meant "triple reading" rather than Persephone. Maura jumped off the table, landing with enough force that the glasses in the cabinet rattled. Blue climbed down more respectfully. She was, after all, holding a box of lightbulbs.

Maura explained, "It’s when three of us — usually Persephone, Calla, and I — read your cards at the same time and compare our interpretations. She doesn’t offer that to just anyone, you know."

"Is it more expensive?"

"Not if you change that one stubborn bulb," Maura said, wiping her hands off on her jeans.

"Fine," said the man, but he sounded vexed about it.

Maura gestured for Blue to give a lightbulb to the man, and then she said, "Persephone, would you get Calla?"

"Oh dear," Persephone said in a small voice — and Persephone’s voice was already quite small, so her small voice was indeed tiny — but she did not turn to go up the stairs and stared at Blue.

Maura eyed Blue, before realizing what Persephone meant.

"My daughter, Blue, will be doing the reading in place of Calla. Yes, she is blind. No, this isn’t a trick."

With an interested glance at Blue, the man climbed onto the table, which creaked a bit under the weight. He grunted as he tried to twist the stubborn bulb.

"Now you see the problem," Maura said. "What is your name?"

"Ah," he said, giving the bulb a jerk. "Can we leave this anonymous?"

Maura said, "We’re psychics, not strippers."

Blue laughed, but the man didn’t. She thought this was rather unfair of him; maybe it was in slightly poor taste, but it was funny.

With a new bulb screwed into place, he stepped onto a chair and then to the floor.

"We’ll be discreet," Maura promised. She gestured for him to follow her.

In the reading room, the man looked around with clinical interest. His gaze passed over the candles, the potted plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally landed on a framed photograph of Steve Martin.

"Signed," Maura said with some pride, noticing his attention. Then: "Ah, Blue, I’ll get your cards.”

Then Maura plucked her deck of cards from a shelf by her head and flopped into a chair at the end of the table. Behind her, Persephone stood in the doorway, her hands clasping and unclasping each other. Blue slid hastily into a chair at the end of the table. The room seemed a lot smaller than it had a few minutes before.

Persephone said, in a kind voice, "Have a seat," and Maura said, in a faux kind one, "What is it you want to know?"

The man dropped into a seat. Maura took the chair opposite from him at the table, with Blue and Persephone (and Persephone’s hair) on either side of her.

"I would rather not say," the man said. "Maybe you’ll tell me."

Persephone whispered. "Maybe."

Maura slid her deck of cards across the table to the man and told him to shuffle them. He did so with proficiency and little self-consciousness. When he was done, Persephone and Blue did the same.

"You’ve been to a reading before," Maura noted.

He made only a vaguely grumbling noise of assent. Blue knew he was the type that thought that any information would let them fake the reading. Still, she didn’t think he was a skeptic. He was merely skeptical of them.

Maura slid her deck back from the man. She’d had her deck for as long as Blue had been paying attention, and the edges were fuzzy with handling. They were a standard tarot deck, only as impressive as she made them. She selected ten cards and laid them out. Blue did the same with her slightly crisper deck — she had decided two years ago to expand into card reading. The room was quiet enough to hear the rustle of their cards against the uneven, pocked surface of the reading table.

Persephone held her cards in her long, long hands, eyeing the man for a pregnant moment. Finally, she contributed only two cards, one at the beginning of the spread and one at the end. Blue loved _watching_ Persephone lay down her cards; the limpid turn of her wrist and the swick of the card always made it seem like a sleight of hand or a dance movement. Even the cards themselves seemed more otherworldly. Maura had told Blue once that it was hard to ask Persephone questions that you didn’t absolutely need the answer to, so Blue had never found out where the deck had come from.

Now that the cards were laid out, Maura and Persephone studied the shape of them. Blue _read_ the _impressions_ she interpreted from the cards. She tried to ignore that, this close to the man, he had the overpowering chemical scent of a manly shower gel. The sort that normally came in a black bottle and was called something like SHOCK or EXCITE or BLUNT TRAUMA.

Blue was the first to speak. She flipped the three of swords around for the man to look at. On her card, the three swords stabbed into a dark, bleeding heart the color of her lips. "You’ve lost someone close to you."

The man looked at his hands. "I have lost …" he started, then considered before finishing, "… many things."

Maura pursed her lips. One of Blue’s eyebrows edged toward her hair. They darted glances at each other. Maura’s glance asked, What do you think? Blue’s said, This is off. Persephone’s said nothing.

Maura touched the edge of the five of pentacles. "Money’s a concern," she noted. On her card, a man with a crutch limped through snow under a stained-glass window while a woman held a shawl beneath her chin.

She added, "Because of a woman."

The man’s gaze was unflinching. "My parents had considerable resources. My father was implicated in a business scandal. Now they’re divorced and there is no money. Not for me."

It was a strangely unpleasant way to put it. Relentlessly factual.

Maura wiped her palms on her slacks. She gestured to another card. "And now you’re in a tedious job. It’s something you’re good at but tired of."

His lips were thin with the truth of it.

Persephone touched the first card she had drawn. The knight of pentacles. An armored man with cold eyes surveyed a field from the back of a horse, a coin in his hand. Blue thought if she looked closely at the coin, she could see a shape in it. Three curving lines, a long, beaked triangle. The shape from the churchyard, from Maura’s unmindful drawing, from the journal.

But no, when she looked harder, it was just a faintly drawn, five-pointed star. The pentacle for which the card was named.

Persephone finally spoke. In her small, precise voice, she told the man, "You’re looking for something."

The man’s head jerked toward her.

Blue’s card, beside Persephone’s, was also the knight of pentacles. It was unusual for two decks to agree exactly. Even stranger was to see that Maura’s card was also the knight of pentacles. Three cold-eyed knights surveyed the land before them.

Three again.

Blue said, a little bitterly, "You’re willing to do whatever it takes to find it. You’ve been working at it for years."

"Yes," the man snapped, surprising them all with the ferocity of his response. "But how much longer? Will I find it?"

The three women scanned the cards again, looking for an answer to his question. All focused their attention from the Tower, which meant his life was about to change dramatically, to the last card in the reading, the page of cups. Blue glanced at her frowning mother. It wasn’t that the page of cups was a negative card; in fact, it was the card Maura always said she thought represented Blue when she was doing a reading for herself.

You’re the page of cups, Maura had told her once. Look at all that potential she holds in that cup. Look, she even looks like you.

But there was not just one page of cups in this reading. Like the knight of pentacles, it was tripled. Three young people holding a cup of full of potential, all wearing Blue’s face. Blue _sensed_ Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.

Blue’s skin prickled, _something’s off_. With the man, with his reading. Suddenly, she felt as if there was no end to the fates she was tied to. Gansey, that unseeable place in Neeve’s scrying bowl, this strange man sitting beside her. Her pulse was racing.

Maura stood up so quickly that her chair keeled back against the wall.

"The reading’s done," she snapped.

Persephone’s gaze wandered up to Maura’s face, bewildered, and Blue looked confused but delighted at the appearance of conflict.

"Excuse me?" the man asked. "The other cards —"

"You heard her," Calla said, all acid. Suddenly entering the room. Blue didn’t know if Calla was also uneasy by the cards, or if she was merely backing Maura up. "The reading’s over."

"Get out of my house," Maura said. Then, with an obvious attempt at solicitude, "Now. Thank you. Good-bye."

Blue remained seated as Maura to whirled past her to the front door. Maura pointed over the threshold.

Rising to his feet, the man said, "I’m incredibly insulted."

Maura didn’t reply. As soon as he was clear of the doorway, she slammed the door shut behind him. The dishes in the cupboards rattled once again.

Calla had moved to the window. She drew the curtains aside and leaned her forehead against the glass to watch him leave.

Maura paced back and forth beside the table. Blue thought of asking a question, then stopped, then started again. Then stopped. It seemed wrong to ask a question if no one else was. From the reading though, she understand her mother’s abrupt reaction. _Something was wrong with that man. Something off._

Persephone said, "What an unpleasant young man."

Calla let the curtains drift shut. She remarked, "I got his license plate number."

"I hope he never finds what he’s looking for," Maura said.

Retrieving her two cards from the table, Persephone said, a little regretfully, "He’s trying awfully hard. I rather think he’ll find something."

Maura whirled toward Blue. "Blue, if you ever _see_ that man again, you just walk the other way."

"No," Calla corrected. "Kick him in the nuts. Then run the other way."


	16. Chapter 16

Helen, Gansey’s older sister, called right as Gansey got to the Parrishes’ dirt road. Accepting phone calls in the Pig was always tricky. The Camaro was a stick shift, to start with, and as loud as a semitruck, to end with, and in between those two things were a host of steering problems, electrical interferences, and grimy gearshift knobs. The upshot was that Helen was barely audible and Gansey nearly drove into the ditch.

"When is Mom’s birthday?" Helen asked. Gansey was simultaneously pleased to hear her voice and annoyed to be bothered by something so trivial. For the most part, he and his sister got along well; Gansey siblings were a rare and complicated species, and they didn’t have to pretend to be something they weren’t around each other.

"You’re the wedding planner," Gansey said as a dog ripped out of nowhere. It barked furiously, trying to bite the Camaro’s tires. "Shouldn’t dates be your realm of expertise?"

"That means you don’t remember," Helen replied. "And I’m not a wedding planner anymore. Well. Part-time. Well. Full-time, but not every day."

Helen did not need to be anything. She didn’t have careers, she had hobbies that involved other people’s lives.

"I do remember," he said tensely. "It’s May tenth." A lab mix tied in front of the first house bayed dolorously as he passed. The other dog continued to worry at his tires, a snarl ascending with the engine note. Three kids in sleeveless shirts stood in one of the yards shooting milk jugs with BB guns; they shouted Hey, Hollywood! and affably aimed guns at the Pig’s tires. They pretended to hold phones by their ears. Gansey felt a peculiar stab at the three of them, their camaraderie, their belonging, products of their surroundings. He wasn’t sure if it was pity or envy. Everywhere was dust.

Helen asked, "Where are you? You sound like you’re on the set of a Guy Ritchie movie."

"I’m going to see a friend."

"The mean one, or the white trash one?"

"Helen."

She replied, "Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy."

"Helen."

Adam didn’t live in a trailer park, technically, since every house was a double-wide. Adam had told him that the last of the single-wide trailers had been taken out a few years ago, but he had said it ironically, like even he knew that doubling the size of the trailers didn’t change much.

"Dad calls them worse things," Helen said. "Mom said one of your weird New Age books was delivered to the house yesterday. Are you coming home anytime soon?"

"Maybe," Gansey said. Somehow seeing his parents always reminded him of how little he’d accomplished, how similar he and Helen were, how many red ties he owned, how he was slowly growing up to be everything Ronan was afraid of becoming. He pulled in front of the light blue double-wide where the Parrishes lived. "Maybe for Mom’s birthday. I have to go. Things might get ugly."

The cell phone speaker made Helen’s laugh a hissing, pitchless thing. "Listen to you, sounding all badass. I bet you’re just listening to a CD called ‘The Sounds of Crime’ while you cruise for chicks outside the Old Navy in your Camaro."

"Bye, Helen," said Gansey. He clicked END and climbed out.

Fat, shiny carpenter bees swooped at his head, distracted from their work of destroying the stairs. After he knocked, he looked out across the flat, ugly field of dead grass. The idea that you had to pay for the beauty in Henrietta should have occurred to him before then, but it hadn’t. No matter how many times Adam told him he was foolish about money, he couldn’t seem to get any wiser about it.

There is no spring here, Gansey realized, and the thought was unexpectedly grim.

Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. In comparison to Gansey’s mother, she seemed old and hard-edged.

"Adam’s out back," she said, before he could ask her anything. She glanced to him and away, not holding his gaze. Gansey never failed to be amazed at how Adam’s parents reacted to the Aglionby sweater. They knew everything they needed to about him before he even opened his mouth.

"Thanks," Gansey said, but the word felt like sawdust in his mouth, and in any case, she was already closing the door.

Under the old carport behind the house, he found Adam lying beneath an old Bonneville pulled up onto ramps, initially invisible in the cool blue shadows. An empty oil pan protruded from under the car. There was no sound coming from beneath the car, and Gansey suspected that Adam wasn’t working so much as avoiding being in the house.

"Hey, tiger," Gansey said.

Adam’s knees bent as if he were going to scoot himself out from under the car, but then he didn’t.

"What’s up?" he said flatly.

Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it. He dropped a notebook on the worktable. "Those are notes from today. I couldn’t tell them you were sick. You missed too much last month."

Adam’s voice was even. "What did you tell them, then?"

One of the tools under the car made a halfhearted scraping sound.

"Come on, Parrish. Come out," Gansey said. "Get it over with."

Gansey jumped as a cold dog nose shoved into his dangling palm — the mutt that had so savagely attacked his tires earlier. He reluctantly fondled one of her stumpy ears and then jerked his hand back as she leapt at the car, barking at Adam’s feet when they started to move. The ripped knees of Adam’s camo cargo pants appeared first, then his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt, then, finally, his face.

A bruise spread over his cheekbone, red and swelling as a galaxy. A darker one snaked over the bridge of his nose.

Gansey said immediately, "You’re leaving with me."

"It will only make it worse when I come back," Adam told him.

"I mean for good. Move into Monmouth. Enough’s enough."

Adam stood up. The dog pranced delightedly around his feet as if he’d been gone to another planet instead of merely underneath a car. Wearily, he asked, "And what about when Glendower takes you away from Henrietta?"

Gansey couldn’t say it wouldn’t happen. "You come with."

"I come with? Tell me how that would work. I lose all the work I put in at Aglionby. I have to play the game again at another school."

Adam had once told Gansey, Rags to riches isn’t a story anyone wants to hear until after it’s done. But it was a story that was hard to finish when Adam had missed school yet again. There was no happy ending without passing grades.

Gansey said, "You wouldn’t have to go to a school like Aglionby. It doesn’t have to be an Ivy League. There are different ways to be successful."

At once, Adam said, "I don’t judge you for what you do, Gansey."

And this was an uneasy place to be, because Gansey knew it took a lot for Adam to accept his reasons for chasing Glendower. Adam had plenty of reasons to be indifferent about Gansey’s nebulous anxiety, his questioning of why the universe had chosen him to be born to affluent parents, wondering if there was some greater purpose that he was alive. Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.

The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused, and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich.

And Ronan had said, Hey, I’m rich, and it doesn’t bother me.

Out loud, Gansey said, "Fine, then. We’d find another good school. We play the game. We make up a new life for you."

Adam reached past him to find a rag and began to wipe between each greasy finger. "I would have to find jobs, too. This didn’t happen overnight. Do you know how long it took me to find these?"

He didn’t mean working in the carport outside his father’s double-wide. That was merely a chore. Adam held down three jobs, the most important of which was at the trailer factory just outside Henrietta.

"I could cover you until you found something."

There was a very long silence as Adam continued scrubbing his fingers. He didn’t look up at Gansey. This was a conversation they’d had before, and entire days of arguments were replayed in the few moments of quiet. The words had been said often enough that they didn’t need to be said again.

Success meant nothing to Adam if he hadn’t done it for himself.

Gansey tried his best to keep his voice even, but a bit of heat crept in. "So you won’t leave because of your pride? He’ll kill you."

"You’ve watched too many cop shows."

"I’ve watched the evening news, Adam," Gansey snapped. "Why don’t you let Ronan teach you to fight? He’s offered twice now. He means it."

With great care, Adam folded the greasy rag and draped it back over a toolbox. There was a lot of stuff in the carport. New tool racks and calendars of topless women and heavy-duty air compressors and other things Mr. Parrish had decided were more valuable than Adam’s school uniform. "Because then he will kill me."

"I don’t follow."

Adam said, "He has a gun."

Gansey said, "Christ."

Laying a hand on the mutt’s head — it drove her insane with happiness — Adam leaned out of the carport to look down the dirt road. He didn’t have to tell Gansey what he was watching for.

"Come on, Adam," said Gansey. Please. "We’ll make it work."

A wrinkle formed between Adam’s eyebrows as he looked away. Not at the double-wides in the foreground, but past them, to the flat, endless field with its tufts of dry grass. So many things survived here without really living. He said, "It means I never get to be my own person. If I let you cover for me, then I’m yours. I’m his now, and then I’ll be yours."

It struck Gansey harder than he thought it would. Some days, all that grounded him was the knowledge that his and Adam’s friendship existed in a place that money couldn’t influence. Anything that spoke to the contrary hurt Gansey more than he would have admitted out loud. With precision, he asked, "Is that what you think of me?"

"You don’t know, Gansey," Adam said. "You don’t know anything about money, even though you’ve got all of it. You don’t know how it makes people look at me and at you. It’s all they need to know about us. They’ll think I’m your monkey."

I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam.

Gansey shot back, "You think your plans are going to keep working when you miss school and work because you let your dad pound the shit out of you? You’re as bad as her. You think you deserve it."

Without warning, Adam slammed a small box of nails off the ledge beside him. The sound it made on the concrete startled both of them.

Adam turned his back to Gansey, his arms crossed.

"Don’t pretend you know," he said. "Don’t come here and pretend you know anything."

Gansey told himself to walk away. To say nothing else. Then he said, "Don’t pretend you have anything to be proud of, then."

As soon as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t fair, or even if it had been fair, it wasn’t right. But he wasn’t sorry he’d said it.

He went back to the Camaro and took his phone out to call Ronan, but the cell signal had completely disappeared, like it often did in Henrietta. Usually, Gansey took that as a sign that something supernatural was affecting the energy around the town, knocking down the cell signal and sometimes even the electricity.

Now, he thought it probably just meant he wasn’t getting through to anyone.

Closing his eyes, he thought about the bruise on Adam’s face, with its spreading, soft edges, and the hard red mark over his nose. He imagined coming here one day and finding that Adam wasn’t here, but in the hospital, or worse, that Adam was here, but that something important had been beaten out of him.

Even imagining it made him feel sick.

The car jerked then, and Gansey’s eyes came open as the passenger door groaned.

"Wait, Gansey," Adam said, out of breath. He was all folded over to be able to see inside the car. His bruise looked ghastly. It made his skin seem transparent. "Don’t leave like —"

Sliding his hands off the wheel and into his lap, Gansey peered up at him. This was the part where Adam was going to tell him not to take what he’d said personally. But it felt personal.

"I’m only trying to help."

"I know," Adam told him. "I know. But I can’t do it that way. I can’t live with myself that way."

Gansey didn’t understand, but he nodded. He wanted it to be over; he wanted it to be yesterday, when he and Ronan and Adam were listening to the recorder and Adam’s face was still unmarked. Behind Adam, he saw the figure of Mrs. Parrish watching from the porch.

Adam closed his eyes for a minute. Gansey could see his irises moving underneath the thin skin of his eyelids, a dreamer awake.

And then, in one easy movement, he’d slid into the passenger seat. Gansey’s mouth opened to form a question he didn’t ask.

"Let’s go," Adam said. He didn’t look at Gansey. His mother stared at them from the porch, but he didn’t look at her, either. "The psychic was the plan, right? We’re doing the plan."

"Yes. But —"

"I need to be back by ten."

Now Adam looked at Gansey. There was something fierce and chilling in his eyes, an unnamable something that Gansey was always afraid would eventually take over completely. This, he knew, was a compromise, a risky gift that he could choose to reject.

After a moment of hesitation, Gansey bumped knuckles with him over the gearshift. Adam rolled down the window and gripped the roof as if he needed to hold on.

As the Camaro headed slowly out of the single-track road, their path was blocked by a blue Toyota pickup truck, approaching from the other way. Adam’s breath stopped audibly. Through the windshield, Gansey met the eyes of Adam’s father. Robert Parrish was a big thing, colorless as August, grown from the dust that surrounded the trailers. His eyes were dark and small and Gansey could see nothing of Adam in them.

Robert Parrish spit out the window. He didn’t pull over for them to pass. Adam’s face was turned out to the cornfield, but Gansey didn’t look away.

"You don’t have to come," said Gansey, because he had to say it.

Adam’s voice came from far away. "I’m coming."

Jerking the wheel of the car, Gansey revved the engine up high. The Pig stormed off the road, clouds of dirt exploding from the tires, and slammed through the shallow ditch. His heart thudded with anticipation and danger and the desire to shout everything he thought about Adam’s father to Adam’s father.

As they charged back onto the driveway on the other side of the Toyota, Gansey could feel Robert Parrish’s stare follow them.

The weight of that gaze seemed like a more substantial promise of the future than anything a psychic might tell him.


	17. Chapter 17

Of course, Gansey was not on time for his reading. The appointment time came and went. No Gansey. Blue pulled aside the curtains to glance up and down the street, but there was no _auras_ but normal after-work traffic. Maura made excuses.

"Maybe he wrote down the wrong time," she said.

Blue didn’t think he’d written down the wrong time.

Ten more minutes slouched by. Maura said, "Maybe he had car trouble."

Blue didn’t think he had car trouble.

Calla retrieved the novel she’d been reading and started upstairs. Her voice carried down toward them. "That reminds me. You need to get that belt looked at on the Ford. I see a breakdown in your future. Next to that sketchy furniture store. A very ugly man with a cell phone will stop and be overly helpful."

It was possible she really did see a breakdown in Maura’s future, but it was also possible she was being hyperbolic. In any case, Maura made a note on the calendar.

"Maybe I accidentally told him tomorrow afternoon instead of today," Maura said.

Persephone murmured, "That is always possible," and said, "Perhaps I will make a pie." Blue looked anxiously to Persephone. Pie making was a lengthy and loving process, and Persephone did not like to be interrupted during it. She wouldn’t begin a pie if she really thought Gansey’s arrival would interrupt her.

Maura eyed Persephone as well before retrieving a bag of yellow squash and a stick of butter from the fridge. Now Blue knew precisely how the rest of the day was going to go. Persephone would make something sweet. Maura would make something with butter. Eventually, Calla would reappear and make something involving sausage or bacon. It was how every evening went if a meal hadn’t been planned in advance.

Blue didn’t think that Maura had told Gansey tomorrow afternoon instead of today. What she thought was that Gansey had looked at the clock on his Mercedes-Benz’s dashboard or Aston Martin’s radio and had decided that the reading interfered with his rock climbing or racquetball. And then he’d blown it off. She couldn’t really be surprised. They’d done exactly what she expected from Raven boys.

Just as Blue was getting ready to sulk upstairs with her computer and work on homework, Orla howled from the Phone Room, her wordless wail eventually resolving itself into words:

"There is a 1973 Camaro in front of the house! It matches my nails!"

"Well, here we go," Maura said, abandoning her squash in the sink. Calla reappeared in the kitchen, exchanging a sharp look with Persephone.

Blue’s stomach dropped to her feet.

Gansey. That’s all there is.

The doorbell rang.

"Are you ready?" Calla asked Blue.

Gansey was the boy she either killed or fell in love with. Or both. There was no being ready. There just was this: Maura opening the door.

There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.

"Sorry that I’m late," said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. "Will it be a problem?"

Blue knew that voice.

She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.

Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him. At Nino’s, the blare of the music had drowned out the finer points of his voice and the odor of garlic had overwhelmed the scent of mint.

But now that she put two and two together, it seemed obvious.

Gansey. This was Gansey.

And that meant that the journal belonged to him.

That meant that she was to fall in _love_ with him.

"Well," Maura said. It was clear her curiosity overruled all rules of scheduling. "It’s not too late. Come into the reading room. Can I get some names?"

Because of course President Cell Phone had brought most of his posse from Nino’s, everyone but the fourth boy. No point in asking Mom about it then, thought Blue. They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them. They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top-Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms.

"Gansey," President Cell Phone said again, pointing to himself. "Adam. Ronan. Where do you want us? There?"

He pointed a hand toward the reading room, palm flat, like he was directing traffic.

"In there," Maura agreed. "This is my daughter, by the way. She’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind."

Gansey’s eyes found Blue. He’d been smiling politely, but now his face froze in the middle of the smile.

"Hi, again," he said. "This is awkward."

"You’ve met?" Maura shot a poisonous look at Blue. Blue felt unfairly persecuted.

"Yes," Gansey replied, with dignity. "We had a discussion about alternative professions for women. I didn’t realize she was your daughter. Adam?"

He shot a nearly as poisonous look at Adam; whose eyes were large. Adam was the only one not in uniform, and his palm was spread across his chest as if his fingers would cover his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.

"I didn’t know, either!" Adam said. To Blue, he said, again, "I didn’t know, I swear."

"I need everyone to sit down." stated Maura with a voice that left no room for argument.

It was such an alarming thing to hear Maura use that tone of voice that nearly everyone did, sinking or throwing themselves into the mismatched furniture in the reading room. Adam rubbed a hand over his cheekbone for reasons unknown only to Blue. Gansey sat in an armchair at the head of the table, his hands stretched over either arm like chairman of the board, one eyebrow raised as he looked at Steve Martin’s framed face. Blue sat at the reading table, the same seat from when she read that man’s cards just the other day.

Only Calla and Ronan remained standing, and they regarded each other warily.

It still felt like there had never been this many people in the house, which was utterly untrue. It was possibly true that there had never been this many men in the house before. Certainly never this many raven boys.

Blue felt as if their very presence robbed something from her. They’d made her family dingy just by coming here.

"It is," Maura said, "too damn loud in here." The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.

"Do I need to leave? Calla can do the reading in my place." Blue asked, though that was the last thing she wanted.

Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, "Why would you have to leave?"

"She makes things louder for us," Maura said. She was frowning over all of them as if she was trying to make sense of it. "And you three are … very loud already."

Blue’s skin was hot. She could imagine herself heating like an electrical conduit, sparks from all parties traveling through her. They were loud, their _auras_ were all vibrant to Blue, teeming with something _more_. Ronan’s did not look _orange_ and Blue wasn’t sure what to call it. It was _loud_ though. What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother though?

"What do you mean, very loud?" Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.

"She mean that there is something about your energies that is very …" Blue trailed off, losing interest in her own explanation. Blue turned to Maura who turned to Persephone. The look exchanged among them. It was, What is going on?

"How do we even do this?" Maura questioned.

The way she asked it, distracted and vague, made Blue’s stomach clench with nerves. Her mother was undone. For the second time, a reading seemed to be pushing her to a place she wasn’t comfortable with. For the second time, Blue felt uncomfortable but not because something was off but because of how _loud_ their energies were.

"One at a time?" Persephone suggested, her voice nearly inaudible.

Calla said, "One-offs. You’ll have to, or some of them will have to leave. They’re just too noisy."

Adam and Gansey glanced at each other. Ronan picked at the leather straps around his wrist.

"What is a one-off?" Gansey asked. "How is it different from a regular reading?"

Calla spoke to Maura as if he hadn’t said anything at all. "It doesn’t matter what they want. It is what it is. Take it or leave it."

Maura’s finger was still pressed under her jaw. She told Gansey, "A one-off is where you each draw just one card from a deck of tarot cards, and we interpret."

Gansey and Adam shared some sort of private conversation with their eyes. It was the sort of thing Blue was used to transpiring between her, her mother and Persephone or Calla, and she hadn’t thought anyone else really capable of it. It also made her feel strangely jealous; she wanted something like that, a bond strong enough to transcend words.

Adam’s head jerked a nod in response to whatever Gansey’s unspoken statement might have been, and Gansey said, "Whatever you’re comfortable with."

Persephone and Maura momentarily debated, though it didn’t seem like they’d be comfortable with anything at the moment.

"Wait," Persephone said as Maura produced her deck of cards. "Have Blue deal it."

It wasn’t the first time Blue had been asked to deal the cards. Sometimes, at difficult or important readings, the women wanted Blue to touch the deck first, to hone whatever messages the cards might contain. This time, she was overly aware of the boys’ attention as she was handed the cards from her mother. For the boys’ benefit, she shuffled the deck in a slightly theatrical fashion, moving cards from one hand to another. She was very good at card tricks that didn’t involve any psychic talent whatsoever. As the boys, impressed, watched the cards fly back and forth, Blue mused that she would make for an excellent eccentric, obviously fake, psychic. But she wasn’t and laid the cards out onto the table.

No one volunteered immediately to go first. So she waited until one decided to grab a card. Adam, it seemed decided to step up to the table. There was something forceful and intentional about the gesture, more aggressive than he’d been the night he approached her.

Selecting a card, Adam presented it to Maura.

"Two of swords," she said. Blue sucked in a breath. She knew what that card’s interpretation would be.

Maura continued, "You’re avoiding a hard choice. Acting by not acting. You’re ambitious, but you feel like someone’s asking something of you you’re not willing to give. Asking you to compromise your principles. Someone close to you, I think. Your father?"

"Brother, I think," Persephone said.

"I don’t have a brother, ma’am," Adam replied. But Blue _saw_ him dart his head in Gansey’s direction.

"Do you want to ask a question?" Maura asked.

Adam considered. "What’s the right choice?"

Maura and Persephone conferred. Maura replied, "There isn’t a right one. Just one you can live with. There might be a third option that will suit you better, but right now, you’re not seeing it because you’re so involved with the other two. I’d guess from what I’m seeing that any other path would have to do with you going outside those other two options and making your own option. I’m also sensing you’re a very analytical thinker. You’ve spent a lot of time learning to ignore your emotions, but I don’t think this is a time for that."

"Thanks," Adam said. It wasn’t quite the right thing to say, but it wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Blue liked how polite he was. It seemed different than Gansey’s politeness. When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.

It seemed right to leave Gansey for last, so Blue vaguely gestured to Ronan, though she was a little afraid of him. Something about him dripped venom, even though he hadn’t spoken. Worst of all, in Blue’s opinion, was that there was something about his antagonism that made her want to court his favor, to earn his approval. The approval of someone like him, who clearly cared for no one, seemed like it would be worth more.

When Blue pointed to the cards, he scanned the women in the room and said, "I’m not taking one. Tell me something true first."

"Beg your pardon?" Calla said stiffly, answering for Maura.

Ronan’s voice was glass, cold and brittle. "Everything you’ve told him could apply to anybody. Anybody with a pulse has doubts. Anybody alive has argued with their brother or their father. Tell me something no one else can tell me. Don’t toss a playing card at me and spoon feed me some Jungian bullshit. Tell me something specific."

Blue’s eyes narrowed. Persephone stuck out her tongue slightly, a habit born of uncertainty, not impudence. Maura shifted with annoyance. "We don’t do specif —"

Calla interrupted. "A secret killed your father and you know what it was."

The room went deadly silent. Both Persephone and Maura were staring at Calla. Gansey and Adam were staring at Ronan. Blue was staring at Calla’s hand, which gripped Ronan’s collar. Cialina said at Nico’s that he had tattoos on his collar and arms.

Maura often called on Calla to do joint tarot readings, and Persephone sometimes called on her to interpret her dreams, but very rarely did anyone ask Calla to use one of her strangest gifts: psychometry. Calla had an uncanny ability to hold an object and sense its origin, feel its owner’s thoughts, and see places the thing had been. Blue does have psychometry but to a lesser degree than Calla. That's how she _knew_ that the journal belonged to Gansey.

Now, Calla pulled her hand away; she’d reached to touch Ronan’s tattoo right where it met his collar. His face was turned just slightly, looking to where her fingers had been.

There might have only been Ronan and Calla in the room. He was a head taller than her already, but he looked young beside her, like a lanky wildcat not yet up to weight. She was a lioness.

She hissed, "What are you?"

Ronan’s _outline_ shifted to a hostile one that made Blue all the more afraid. He does have a different _aura_. One that doesn’t suggest the _orange_ of a normal human. Blue doesn’t know what the _color_ would be called yet.

"Ronan?" Gansey asked, concern in his voice.

"I’m waiting in the car." Without further comment, Ronan left, slamming the door hard enough that the dishes in the kitchen rattled.

Gansey turned an accusatory gaze on Calla. "His father’s dead."

"I know," Calla said. Her eyes were slits.

Gansey’s voice was cordial enough to pass straight through polite and on to rude. "I don’t know how you found out, but that’s a pretty lousy thing to throw at a kid."

"At a snake, you mean," Calla snarled back. "And what is it you came for, if you didn’t believe we could do what we’re charging you for? He asked for a specific. I gave him a specific. I’m sorry it wasn’t puppies."

“Why bothering coming to a psychic reading if you were just going to deny or be skeptical of whatever we say?” Blue questioned, lacking Calla’s ferociousness.

"Calla. Blue," Maura said, at the same time that Adam said, "Gansey."

Adam murmured something directly into Gansey’s ear and then leaned back. A bone moved at Gansey’s jawline. Blue saw him shift back into President Cell Phone; she hadn’t been aware, before, that he’d been anything else. Now she wished she’d been paying better attention, so she could’ve seen what was different about him.

Gansey said, "I’m sorry. Ronan is blunt, and he wasn’t comfortable coming here in the first place. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that you were less than genuine. Can we continue?"

He sounded so old, Blue thought. So formal in comparison to the other boys he’d brought. There was something intensely discomfiting about him, akin to how she felt compelled to impress Ronan. Something about Gansey made her feel so strongly other that it was as if she had to guard her emotions against him. She could not like him, or whatever it was about these boys that drowned out her psychic abilities, and her mother’s, and filled the room to overflowing would overwhelm them.

"You’re fine," Maura said, though she looked at glowering Calla when she said it.

There was something odd and complicated about all of these boys, Blue thought — odd and complicated in the way that the journal was odd and complicated. Their lives were somehow a web, and she had somehow managed to do something to get herself stuck in the very edge of it. Whether that something had been done in the past or was going to be done in the future seemed irrelevant. In this room with Maura and Calla and Persephone, time felt circular.

She gaze stopped in front of Gansey. He moved closer to the table for his turn to draw. This close, she again caught the scent of mint, and that made Blue’s heart trip unsteadily.

Gansey looked down at the fanned deck of cards on the table. When she _saw_ him like that, she remembered his spirit, and the boy she’d been afraid she’d fall in love with. That _shade_ hadn’t worn any of the effortless, breezy confidence of this raven boy in front of her.

What happens to you, Gansey? she wondered. When do you become that person?

Gansey looked up at her, and there was a crease between his eyebrows. "I don’t know how to choose. Could you pick a card for me? Will that work?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Blue saw Adam shifting in his chair, likely frowning.

Persephone answered from behind Blue. "If you want it to."

"It’s about intention," Maura added.

"I want you to," he said. "Please."

Blue let her fingers float above the cards. The correct cards sometimes felt warm or tingly when her fingers were near them. For Blue, of course, there was only one that she ever chose.

As she flipped it over, she let out a little helpless laugh.

The page of cups looked back at Blue with her own face. It felt like someone was laughing at her, but she had no one to blame for the selection of the card but herself.

“It’s the page of cups, isn’t it?” Blue stated.

“Yes. How did you know?” Gansey asked, bewildered.

When Maura saw it, her voice went still and remote. "Not that one. Make him choose another."

"Maura," said Persephone mildly, but Maura just waved her hand, dismissing her.

"Another one," she insisted.

"What’s wrong with that one?" Gansey asked.

"It has Blue’s energy on it," Maura said. "It wasn’t meant to be yours. You’ll have to pick it yourself."

Persephone seemed like she had more to say, but she didn’t say anything. Blue replaced the card and shuffled the deck with less drama than before.

When she splayed the cards out and offered them to him, Gansey turned his face away like he was pulling a raffle winner. His fingers grazed the edges of the cards, contemplative. He selected one, then flipped it over to show the room.

It was the page of cups.

He looked at the face on the card, and then at Blue’s face, and Blue knew that he’d seen the similarity.

Maura leaned forward and snatched the card from his fingers. "Pick another one."

"Now why?" Gansey said. "What’s wrong with that card? What does it mean?"

"Nothing’s wrong with it," Maura replied. "It’s just not yours."

Now, for the first time, Blue saw an edge of true aggravation to Gansey’s _outline_ , and it made her like him a little better. So there was something below the raven boy exterior, maybe. Flippantly, Gansey snagged another card, clearly finished with this exercise. With flourish, he turned the card over and slapped it on the table.

Blue swallowed.

Maura said, "That’s your card."

Blue sucked in a breath as she _sensed_ what card it was. She knew it’s appearance, it’s symbolism. On the card on the table was a black knight astride a white horse. The knight’s helmet was lifted so that it was obvious that his face was a bare skull dominated by eyeless sockets. The sun set beyond him, and below his horse’s hooves lay a corpse.

Outside the windows behind them, a breeze hissed audibly through the trees.

"Death." Gansey read the bottom of the card. He didn’t sound surprised or alarmed. He just read the word like he would read eggs or Cincinnati.

"Great job, Maura," Calla said. Her arms were crossed firmly over her chest. "You going to interpret that for the kid?"

"Possibly we should just give him a refund," Persephone suggested, although Gansey had not paid yet.

"I thought that psychics didn’t predict death," Adam said quietly. "I read that the Death card was only symbolic."

Maura and Calla and Persephone all made vague noises. Blue, utterly aware of the truth of Gansey’s fate, felt ill. Aglionby boy or not, he was only her age, and he obviously had friends who cared for him and a life that involved a very loud car, and it was hideous to know he’d be dead in less than twelve months.

"Actually," Gansey said, "I don’t care about that."

Every pair of eyes in the room was on him as he stood the card on its end to study it.

"I mean, the cards are very interesting," he said. He said the cards are very interesting like someone would say this is very interesting to a very strange sort of cake that they didn’t quite want to finish. "And I don’t want to discount what you do. But I didn’t really come here to have my future told to me. I’m quite okay with finding that out for myself."

He cast a quick glance at Calla at this, obviously realizing that he was walking a fine line between "polite" and "Ronan."

"Really, I came because I was hoping to ask you a question about energy," Gansey continued. "I know you deal with energy work, and I’ve been trying to find a ley line I think is near Henrietta. Do you know anything about that?"

The journal!

"Ley line?" Maura repeated. "Maybe. I don’t know if I know it by that name. What is it?"

Blue was a little stunned. She’d always thought her mother was the most truthful person around.

"They’re straight energy lines that crisscross the globe," Gansey explained. "They’re supposed to connect major spiritual places. Adam thought you might know about them because you deal with energy."

It was obvious that he meant the corpse road, but Maura didn’t offer any information. She just pressed her lips together and looked at Persephone and Calla. "Does that ring a bell to you two?"

Persephone pointed a finger straight in the air and then said, "I forgot about my pie crust."

She withdrew from the room. Calla said, "I’d have to think about it. I’m not good with specifics."

There was a faint, amusement about Gansey that meant he knew they were lying. It was a strangely wise expression; once again Blue got the sense that he seemed older than the boys he’d brought with him.

"I’ll look into it," Maura said. "If you leave your number, I can give you a call if I find out anything about it."

Gansey replied, coolly polite, "Oh, that’s quite all right. How much for the reading?"

Standing, Maura said, "Oh, just twenty."

Blue thought this was criminal. Gansey probably had spent more than twenty dollars on the laces for his shoes.

He frowned at Maura over the top of his open wallet. "Twenty?"

"Each," Blue added.

Calla coughed into her fist.

Gansey’s _outline_ relaxed and he handed Maura sixty dollars. Quite obviously this was more what he’d been expecting to pay, and now the world was right again.

It was Adam, though, who Blue noticed then. He was looking at her, sharp-eyed, and she felt transparent and guilty. Not only about overcharging, but about Maura’s lie. Blue had seen Gansey’s spirit walk the corpse road and she had known his name before he walked in this door. Blue _sees_ with the help of the Ley line. Like her mother though, she’d said nothing.

"I’ll show you out," Maura said. She was clearly eager to see them on the other side of the door. For a moment, it looked as if Gansey felt the same, but then he stopped. He paid an undue amount of attention to his wallet as he folded it and reinserted it into his pocket, and then he looked up to Maura and made a firm line of his mouth.

"Look, we’re all adults here," he started.

Calla made a face as if she disagreed.

Gansey squared his shoulders and continued, "So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something, but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me."

It was a brave thing to say, or an arrogant one, or maybe there was not enough of a difference between the two things to matter. Every head in the room swung to Maura.

She said, "I know something, but I don’t want to help you."

For the second time that day, Calla looked delighted. Blue’s mouth was open. She closed it. But why does Mom not want to help?, Blue thought.

Gansey, however, just nodded, no more or less distressed than when Blue had retorted back to him at the restaurant. "All right, then. No, no, you can stay put. We’ll let ourselves out."

And just like that, they did, Adam sending Blue a last look that she couldn’t interpret. A second later, the Camaro revved high, and the tires squealed out Gansey’s true feelings. Then the house was quiet. It was a sucked-out silence, like the raven boys had taken all the sound in the neighborhood with them.

Blue whirled on her mother. "Mom." She was going to say something else, but all that she could manage was again, louder, "Mom!"

"Maura," Calla said, "that was very rude." Then she added, "I liked it."

Maura turned to Blue as if Calla hadn’t spoken. "I don’t want you to ever see him again."

Indignant, Blue cried, "Whatever happened to ‘children should never be given orders’?"

"That was before Gansey." Maura flipped around the Death card, giving Blue a long time to stare at the _essence_ the card emitted. "This is the same as me telling you not to walk in front of a bus."

Several comebacks riffled through Blue’s head before she found one that she wanted. "Why? Neeve didn’t see me on the corpse road. I’m not going to die in the next year."

"First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee," Maura replied. "Second of all, there are other terrible fates besides death. Shall we talk about dismemberment? Paralysis? Endless psychological trauma? There is something really wrong with those boys. When your mother says don’t walk in front of a bus, she has a good reason."

From the kitchen, Persephone’s soft voice called, "If someone had stopped you from walking in front of a bus, Maura, Blue wouldn’t be here."

Maura shot a frown in her direction, then swept her hand across the reading table as if she were clearing it of crumbs. "The best-case scenario here is that you make friends with a boy who’s going to die."

"Ah," said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. "Now I see."

"Don’t psychoanalyze me," her mother said.

"I already have. And I say again, ‘ah.’"

Maura sneered uncharacteristically, and then asked Calla, "What did you see when you touched that other boy? The raven boy?"

"They’re all raven boys," Blue said.

Her mother shook her head. "No, he’s more raven than the others."

Calla rubbed her fingertips together, as if she was wiping the memory of Ronan’s tattoo from them. "It’s like scrying into that weird space. There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse."

"He’s creating?" Blue asked.

"He’s creating," Calla confirmed. "That space is creating, too. I don’t know how to say it any better than that."

“His _aura_ is different from normal humans.” Blue commented. “I don’t know what to call it. He’s not psychic but he’s not normal. None of them seem normal.”

Blue then wondered what sort of creating Calla meant. Blue was always creating things — taking things that already existed and transforming them into something else. This, she felt, was what most people meant when they called someone creative.

But she suspected that wasn’t how Calla meant it. She suspected that what Calla meant was the true meaning of creative: to make a thing where before there was none.

Maura caught Blue’s curious expression. She said, "I’ve never told you to do anything before, Blue. But I’m telling you now. Stay away from them."


	18. Chapter 18

The night following the reading, Gansey woke to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved.

Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. "Make it stop," he said.

Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same week, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe.

The ragged sound cut through the apartment again.

"What fresh hell is this?" Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air.

Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape.

"I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant," Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand.

"I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping."

Ronan shrugged. "Perhaps for you."

"Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?"

In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again — a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex.

"Well, this is not going to do," he said. "You’re going to have to make it stop."

"She has to be fed," Ronan replied. The raven gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. "It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks."

"Can’t you keep her downstairs?"

In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. "You tell me."

Gansey disliked having his kindness appealed to, especially when it had to war with his desire for sleep. There was, of course, no way that he would force the raven downstairs. It looked bite-sized and improbable. He wasn’t certain if it was extremely cute or appallingly ugly, and it bothered him that it managed to be both.

From behind him, Noah said, sounding pitiful, "I don’t like that thing in here. It reminds me of …"

He trailed off, as he often did, and Ronan pointed the tweezers at him. "Hey, man. Stay out of my room."

"Shut up," Gansey told both of them. "That includes you, bird."

"Chainsaw."

Noah withdrew, but Gansey remained. For several minutes, he watched the raven slurp down gray slime while Ronan cooed at her. He was not the Ronan that Gansey had grown accustomed to, but neither was he the Ronan that Gansey had first met. It was clear now that the instrument wailing from the headphones was the Irish pipes. Gansey couldn’t remember the last time Ronan had listened to Celtic music. Niall Lynch’s music. All at once, he, too, missed Ronan’s charismatic father. But more than that, he missed the Ronan that had existed when Niall Lynch had still been alive. This boy in front of him now, fragile bird in his hands, seemed like a compromise.

After a space, Gansey asked, "What did the psychic mean, Ronan? Earlier. About your father."

Ronan didn’t lift his head, but Gansey watched the muscles in his back tighten, stretched as if they were suddenly carrying weight. "That’s a very Declan question."

Gansey considered this. "No. No, I don’t think it is."

"She was just full of shit."

Gansey considered this, too. "No, I don’t think she was."

Ronan found his music player next to him on the bed and paused it. When he replied, his voice was pitchless and naked. "She’s one of those chicks who gets inside your head and fucks around with parts. She said it because she knew it would cause problems."

"Like what?"

"Like you asking me questions like Declan would," Ronan said. He offered the raven another gray mass, but she just stared up at him, transfixed. "Making me think about things I don’t want to think about. Those sorts of problems. Among others. What’s going on with your face, by the way?"

Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it. "Is it growing?"

"Dude, you aren’t really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteenth century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived." Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o’clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. "Just stop. You look mangy."

"It’s irrelevant. It’s not growing. I’m doomed to be a man-child."

"If you keep saying things like ‘man-child,’ we’re done," Ronan said. "Hey, man. Don’t let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard’ll come in great. Like a fucking rug. You eat soup, it’ll filter out the potatoes. Terrier style. Do you have hair on your legs? I’ve never noticed."

Gansey didn’t dignify any of this with a response. With a sigh, he pushed off the wall and pointed at the raven. "I’m going back to bed. Keep that thing quiet. You so owe me, Lynch."

"Whatever," Ronan said.

Gansey retreated to his bed, though he didn’t lie down. He reached for his journal, but it wasn’t there; he’d left it at Nino’s the night of the fight. He thought about calling Malory, but he didn’t know what he wanted to ask. Something inside him felt like the night, hungry and wanting and black. He thought about the dark eyeholes of the skeletal knight on the Death card.

An insect was buzzing against the window, the sort of buzz-tap that came from an insect with some size to it. He thought about his EpiPen, far away in the glove box of the car, too far away to be a useful antidote if it was needed. The insect was probably a fly or a stink bug or yet another crane fly, but the longer he lay there, the more he considered the idea that it could be a wasp or a bee.

It probably wasn’t.

But he opened his eyes. Gansey climbed softly from the bed, bending to retrieve a shoe that lay on its side. Walking cautiously to the window, he searched for the sound of the insect. The shadow of the telescope was an elegant monster on the floor beside him.

Though the sound of buzzing had died away, it only took him a moment to find the insect on the window: a wasp, crawling up the narrow wooden frame of the window, swiveling back and forth. Gansey didn’t move. He watched it climb and pause, climb and pause. The streetlights outside made a faint shadow of its legs, its curved body, the fine, insubstantial point of the stinger.

Two narratives coexisted in his head. One was the real image: the wasp climbing up the wood, oblivious to his presence. The other was a false image, a possibility: the wasp whirring into the air, finding Gansey’s skin, dipping the stinger into him, Gansey’s allergy making it a deadly weapon.

Long ago, his skin had crawled with hornets, their wings beating even when his heart hadn’t.

His throat was tight and full.

"Gansey?"

Ronan’s voice was just behind him, the timbre of it strange and initially unrecognizable. Gansey didn’t turn around. The wasp had just twitched its wings, nearly lifting off.

"Shit, man!" Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more.

"Shit," Ronan said again. "Are you stupid?"

Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling inches from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from "a promising student" to "beyond saving." He turned to Ronan, who had painstakingly picked up the wasp by a broken wing, so that Gansey wouldn’t step on it.

"What did you want?" he asked.

"What?" Ronan demanded.

"You came out for something."

Ronan chucked the wasp’s small body into the waste basket by the desk. The trash was overflowing with crumpled papers, so the body bounced out and forced him to find a better crevice for it. "I can’t even remember."

Gansey merely stood and waited for Ronan to say something else. Ronan fussed over the wasp for another few moments before he said anything, and when he finally did, he didn’t look at Gansey. "What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?"

It wasn’t what Gansey had expected. He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.

"You tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you what’s real."

"Noah told me," Ronan said, "that if you left, Parrish was going with you."

He had let jealousy sneak into his voice, and that made Gansey’s response cooler than it might have been. Gansey tried not to play favorites. "And what else did Noah have to say?"

With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, "Do you not want me to come?"

Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. "I would take all of you anywhere with me."

The moonlight made a strange sculpture of Ronan’s face, a stark portrait incompletely molded by a sculptor who had forgotten to work in compassion. He did his smoker’s inhale, heavy on the intake through the nostrils, light on the exhale through his prison of teeth.

After a pause, he said, "The other night. There’s something —"

But then he stopped without saying anything else. It was a full stop, the sort that Gansey associated with secrets and guilt. It was the stop that happened when you’d made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.

"There’s what?"

Ronan muttered something. He shook the wastebasket.

"There’s what, Ronan?"

He said, "This thing with Chainsaw and the psychic woman, and just, with Noah, and I just think there’s something strange going on."

Gansey couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. "‘Strange’ doesn’t help me. I don’t know what ‘strange’ means."

"I don’t know, man, this sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean strange like your voice on that recorder," Ronan replied. "Strange like the psychic’s daughter. Things feel bigger. I don’t know what I’m saying. I thought you would believe me, of all people."

"I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe."

Ronan said, "It’s starting, man."

Gansey crossed his arms. He could see the dark black wing of the dead wasp pressed against the mesh of the wastebasket. He waited for Ronan to elaborate, but all the other boy said was, "I catch you staring at a wasp again, though, I’m going to let it kill you. Screw that."

Without waiting for a reply, he turned away and retreated back to his room.

Slowly, Gansey picked up his shoe from where Ronan had left it. When he straightened, he realized Noah had drifted from his room to stand near Gansey. His anxious gaze flickered from Gansey to the wastebasket. The wasp’s body had slipped down several inches, but it was still visible.

"What?" Gansey asked. Something about Noah’s uneasy face reminded him of the frightened faces surrounding him, hornets on his skin, the sky blue as death above him. A long, long time ago, he’d been given another chance, and lately, the weight of needing to make it matter felt heavier.

He looked away from Noah, out the wall of windowpanes. Even now, it seemed to Gansey that he could feel the aching presence of the nearby mountains, like the space between him and the peaks was a tangible thing. It was as excruciating as the imagined sleeping countenance of Glendower.

Ronan was right. Things felt bigger. He may not have found the line, or the heart of the line, but something was happening, something was starting.

Noah said, "Don’t throw it away."


	19. Chapter 19

Several days later, Blue woke up sometime well before her alarm. Maybe even dawn.

As they had every night since the reading, thoughts about Adam’s gaze and the memory of Gansey’s _outline_ of a bowed head crowded into her mind as soon as sleep relinquished its hold. Blue couldn’t help replaying the chaotic episode over and over in her mind. Calla’s volatile response to Ronan, Adam and Gansey’s private language commune through glances, the fact that Gansey was not just a spirit on the corpse road. The thing that seized her the most was the idea that her mother had forbidden her to do something. It pinched like a collar.

Blue pushed off the covers. She was getting up.

She bore a grudging fondness for the weird architecture of 300 Fox Way; it was a sort of halfhearted affection born of nostalgia more than any real feeling. But her feelings for the yard behind the house were anything but mixed. A great, spreading beech tree sheltered the entire backyard. It’s beautiful, perfectly symmetrical canopy stretched from one fence line to the other, so dense that only the heaviest rain could penetrate the leaves. Blue had a satchel full of memories of standing by the massive, smooth trunk in the rain, hearing it hiss and tap and scatter across the canopy without ever reaching the ground. Standing under the beech tree, it felt like she was the beech, like the rain rolled off her leaves and off the bark, smooth as skin against her own. Plants and trees were alive, and Blue could see the _green_ of their _auras,_ but they were so much more dull in comparison to the dull _orange_ of normal humans. When Blue focused her intent on the beech tree, it was beautiful. How the branches and roots were spread out. She had a very time putting to words the sheer beauty of what she _saw_ to her family.

With a little sigh, Blue shook the memory from her head and made her way down to the kitchen. She pushed open the back door, using two hands to close it silently behind her. After dark, the yard was its own world, private and dim. The high wooden fence, covered with messy honeysuckle, and the inscrutable canopy of the beech tree presided in their yard.

Tonight, an eerie, uncertainty made Blue hesitate just outside the door, trying to make sense of the indecision. Laying a hand against the side of the house — it was still warm from the heat of the day — she leaned forward. From here, she _saw_ Neeve knelt near the little root-pool. With her pretty hands folded in her lap, she was as motionless as the tree itself and as dark as the sky overhead.

Blue’s breath came out in a rush when she first _saw_ Neeve. "Oh," Blue breathed. "I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here."

But Neeve didn’t reply. When Blue _looked_ closer, she _saw_ that Neeve’s _aura_ wasn’t entirely hers.

"Who’s there?" asked Neeve.

But it was not Neeve’s voice. It was something deeper and farther away.

A nasty little shiver ran up Blue’s arms. Somewhere in the tree above, a bird hissed. At least Blue thought it was a bird.

"Come into the light," said Neeve. "I know you are there," not-Neeve said, in the voice that sounded like dark places, far away from the sun. "I can smell you."

Something crawled very slowly up the back of Blue’s neck, on the inside of her skin. It was such a hideously real creep that she was badly tempted to slap it or scratch it.

She wanted to go inside and pretend she had not come out, but she didn’t want to leave Neeve behind if something — Blue didn’t want to think it, but she did. She didn’t want to leave Neeve behind if something had her.

"I am here," Blue said.

Not-Neeve asked, "What is your name?"

It occurred to Blue that she wasn’t exactly certain that Neeve’s mouth moved when she spoke. It was hard to _look_ at her face. Her _aura_ was off.

"Neeve," Blue lied.

"Come where I can see you."

Not wanting to move closer or be made visible to the unknown presence. Blue shivered. "I am invisible."

"Ahhhhhhh," sighed not-Neeve.

"Who are you?" Blue asked.

"Neeve," said not-Neeve.

There was something crafty now, to the dark voice. Something knowing and malicious, something that made Blue want to check over her shoulder. But she couldn’t turn away from that something in front of the tree, because she was afraid it would touch her if she turned away.

"Where are you?" Blue asked.

"On the corpse road," not-Neeve growled.

Blue became aware that her breath clouded in front of her. Goose bumps pricked her arms, fast and painful. Neeve released a deep, ragged breath.

Rushing forward, Blue made her move and kicked over the thing in front of the tree, in front of Neeve. Unknown to Blue, she kicked an empty bowl which knocked over the unlit candle, scuffed dirt in the direction of the black pool and the candle went out.

There was a minute of complete silence, as if the tree and the yard around it were not in Henrietta anymore. Despite the silence, Blue did not feel alone, and it was a terrible feeling.

I am inside a bubble, she thought furiously. I am in a fortress. There is glass all around me. I can see out, but nothing can get in. I am untouchable. All of the visuals that Maura had given her to protect herself from psychic attack. It felt like nothing at all against the voice that had come out of Neeve.

But then there was nothing. Her goose bumps had disappeared as quickly as they’d come.

"Neeve," whispered Blue.

For a moment, nothing happened, and then Neeve lifted her chin and her hands.

Please be Neeve. Please be Neeve.

Blue’s entire body was poised to run.

Then she _saw_ Neeve’s true _aura_ , and Blue let out a relieved sigh.

"Blue?" Neeve asked. Her voice was quite normal. Then, with sudden understanding: "Oh. You won’t tell your mother about this, will you?"

Blue stared at her. "I most certainly will! What was that? What were you doing?" Her heart was still going fast, and she realized that she was terrified, now that she could think about it.

Neeve looked at the objects before her. "I was scrying."

Her mild voice only infuriated Blue.

"Scrying is what you did earlier. This was not the same thing!"

"I was scrying into that space I saw earlier. I was hoping to make contact with someone who was in it to find out what it was."

Blue’s voice was not nearly as steady as she would’ve liked. "It spoke. It was not you when I came out here."

"Well," Neeve said, sounding a little cross, "that was your fault. You make everything stronger. I wasn’t expecting you to be here, or I would’ve …"

She trailed off and looked at the stub of the candle, her head cocked. It wasn’t a particularly human sort of gesture, and it made Blue remember the nasty chill she had gotten before.

"Would’ve what?" Blue demanded. She was a little cross, too, that she was somehow being blamed for whatever had just happened. "What was that? It said it was on the corpse road. Does that mean it was on the Ley line? Was that why I could _see_ a different _aura_ mixed with yours?"

"Of course," Neeve said. "Henrietta’s on a ley line."

That meant that Gansey was right. It also meant Blue had seen Gansey’s spirit walk along it only a week earlier.

"It’s why it’s easy to be a psychic here," Neeve said. "The energy is strong."

"Energy, like my energy?" Blue asked.

"Energy like your energy. Feeds things. How did you put it? Makes the conversation louder. The lightbulb brighter. Everything that needs energy to stay alive craves it, just like they crave your energy."

"What did you see?" Blue asked. "When you were —?"

"Scrying," Neeve finished for her, though Blue wasn’t at all certain that was how she would’ve finished it. "There’s someone who knows your name there. And there’s someone else who is looking for this thing that you’re looking for."

"That I’m looking for!" Blue echoed, dismayed. There was nothing she was looking for. Unless Neeve was talking about the mysterious Glendower. She recalled that feeling of connection, of feeling tied up in this web of raven boys and sleeping kings and ley lines. Of her mother saying to stay away from them.

"Yes, you know what it is," Neeve replied. "Ah. Everything seems so much clearer now."

Blue felt cold somewhere very deep inside her. "You haven’t said what that was yet."

Neeve looked up then, all of her supplies gathered in her arms. Her gaze was the unbreakable one that could last an eternity.

“That’s because I have no idea,” she said.


	20. Chapter 20

Whelk took the liberty of going through Gansey’s locker before school the next day.

Gansey’s locker, one of the few in use, was only a couple doors down from Whelk’s old one, and the feeling of opening it brought back a rush of memory and nostalgia. Once upon a time, this had been him — one of the wealthiest kids at Aglionby, with whichever friends he wanted, whichever Henrietta girls caught his eye, whichever classes he felt like going to. His father had no compunction about making an extra donation here or there to help Whelk pass a class he’d failed to attend for a few weeks. Whelk longed for his old car. The cops here had known his father well; they hadn’t even bothered to pull Whelk over.

And now Gansey was a king here, and he didn’t even know how to use it.

Thanks to Aglionby’s honor code, there were no locks on any of the lockers, allowing Whelk to open Gansey’s without any fuss. Inside, he found several dusty spiral-bound notebooks with only a few pages used in each. In case Gansey decided to come into school two hours early, Whelk left a note in the locker ("Belongings have been removed while we spray for roaches") and then retreated back to one of the unused staff bathrooms to examine his find.

Sitting cross-legged on the pristine but dusty tile beside the sink, what he found was that Richard Gansey III was more obsessed with the ley line than he had ever been. Something about the entire research process seemed … frantic.

What is wrong with this kid? Whelk wondered, and then immediately afterward felt strange that he had grown old enough to think of Gansey as a kid.

Outside the bathroom, he heard heels clicking down the hallway. The scent of coffee drifted under the doorway; Aglionby was beginning to stir. Whelk flipped to the next notebook.

This one was not about the ley line. It was all historical stuff about the Welsh king Owen Glendower. Whelk was not interested. He skimmed, skimmed, skimmed, thinking it was unrelated, until he realized the case Gansey was making for tying the two elements together: Glendower and the ley line. Stooge or not, Gansey knew how to sell a story.

Whelk focused on one line.

Whoever wakes Glendower is granted a favor (limitless?) (supernatural?) (some sources say reciprocal/what does that mean?)

Czerny had never cared about the ultimate outcome of the ley line search. At first, Whelk hadn’t, either. The appeal had merely been the riddle of it. Then one afternoon Czerny and Whelk, standing in the middle of what seemed to be a naturally formed circle of magnetically charged stones, had experimentally pushed one of the stones out of place. The resulting sizzle of energy had knocked them both off their feet and created a faint apparition of what looked like a woman.

The ley line was raw, uncontrollable, inexplicable energy. The stuff of legends.

Whoever controlled the ley line would be more than rich. Whoever controlled the ley line would be something that the other Aglionby boys could only hope to aspire to.

Czerny still hadn’t cared, not really. He was the most mild, ambitionless creature Whelk had ever seen, which was probably why Whelk liked to hang out with him so much. Czerny didn’t have a problem being no better than the other Aglionby students. He was content to trot along after Whelk. These days, when Whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that Czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead.

They didn’t have to be different things, did they?

"Glendower," Whelk said out loud, trying it out. The word echoed off the bathroom walls, hollow and metallic. He wondered what Gansey — strange, desperate Gansey — was thinking he’d ask for as a favor.

Climbing up off the bathroom floor, Whelk picked up all the notebooks. It would only take a few minutes to copy them in the staff room, and if anyone asked, he’d tell them Gansey had asked him to.

Glendower.

If Whelk found him, he’d ask for what he’d wanted all along: to control the ley line.


	21. Chapter 21

The following afternoon, Blue walked barefoot to the street in front of 300 Fox Way and sat on the curb to wait for Calla beneath the _green_ of the trees. All afternoon Neeve had been locked up in her room and Maura had been doing angel-card readings for a group of out-of-towners on a writing retreat. So Blue had taken all afternoon to contemplate what to do about finding Neeve in the backyard. And what to do involved Calla.

She was just getting restless when Calla’s carpool pulled up at the curb.

"Are you putting yourself out with the trash?" Calla asked as she climbed out of the vehicle. Making a lackadaisical hand motion at the driver, she turned to Blue as the car drove away.

"I need to ask you a question," Blue said.

"And it’s a question that sounds better next to a trash can? Hold this." Calla wrestled one of her bags off her arm and onto Blue’s. She smelled of jasmine and chili peppers, which meant she’d had a bad day at work. Blue wasn’t entirely certain what Calla did for a living, but she knew it had something to do with Aglionby, paperwork, and cursing at students, often on weekends. Whatever her job description was, it involved rewarding herself with burritos on bad days.

Calla began to stomp up the walk toward the front door.

Blue trailed helplessly after her, lugging the bag. It felt like it had books or bodies in it. "The house is full."

Only one of Calla’s eyebrows was paying any attention. "It’s always full."

They were nearly at the front door. Inside, every room was occupied with aunts and cousins and mothers. The sound of Persephone’s angry PhD music was already audible. The only chance for privacy was outside.

Blue said, "I want to know why Neeve’s here."

Calla stopped. She looked at Blue over her shoulder.

"Well, excuse you," she replied, not very pleasantly. "I’d like to know the cause of climate change, too, but no one’s telling me that."

Clutching Calla’s bag like a hostage, Blue insisted, "I’m not six anymore. Maybe everyone else can see what they need to see in a pack of cards, but I’m tired of being left in the dark."

Now she had both of Calla’s eyebrows’ interest.

"Damn straight," Calla agreed. "I wondered when you were going to go all rebellious on us. Why aren’t you asking your mother?"

"Because I’m angry at her for telling me what to do."

Calla shifted her weight. "Take another bag. What is it you propose?"

Blue accepted another bag; this one seemed to have a box in it. "That you just tell me?"

Using one of her newly freed hands, Calla tapped a finger on her lip. "The only thing is, I’m not sure that what we’ve been told is the truth."

Blue felt a little lurch at that. The idea of lying to Calla or Maura or Persephone seemed ludicrous. Even if they didn’t know the truth, they’d hear a lie. But there did seem to be something secretive about Neeve, about her scrying after hours, where she thought it likely no one would see her.

Calla said, "She was supposed to be here looking for someone."

"My father," Blue guessed.

Calla didn’t say yes but she didn’t say no, either. Instead, she replied, "But I think it’s become something else for her, now that she’s been here in Henrietta for a while."

They regarded each other for a moment, co-conspirators.

"My proposition is different, then," Blue said, finally. She tried to arch her eyebrow to match Calla’s, but it felt a bit lacking. "We go through Neeve’s stuff. You hold it, and I’ll stand next to you."

Calla’s mouth became very small. Her psychometric reflections were often vague, but with Blue beside her, making her gift stronger? It had certainly been dramatic when she’d touched Ronan’s tattoo. If she handled Neeve’s things, they might get some concrete answers.

"Take this bag," Calla said, handing Blue the last of them. "She’d have to be out of her room for at least an hour," Calla said. "And Maura would have to be otherwise occupied."

Calla had once observed that Maura had no pets because her principles took too much time to take care of. Maura was a big believer in many things, one of them personal privacy.

"But you will do it?"

"I’ll find out more today," Calla said. "About their schedules. What’s this?" Her attention had shifted to a car pulling up at the end of the walk. Both Calla tilted her head to read out loud the magnetic sign on the passenger door: FLOWERS BY ANDI! The driver rummaged in the backseat of her car for a full two minutes before heading up the walk with the world’s smallest flower arrangement.

"It’s hard to find this place!" the woman said.

Calla pursed her lips. She had a pure and fiery hatred for anything that could be classified as small talk.

"What’s all this?" Calla asked. She made it sound as if the flowers were an unwanted kitten.

"This is for …" The woman fumbled for a card.

"Orla?" guessed Blue.

Orla was always getting sent flowers by various lovelorn men from Henrietta and beyond. It wasn’t just flowers they sent. Some sent spa packages. Others sent fruit baskets. One, memorably, sent an oil portrait of Orla. He’d painted her in profile, so that the viewer, or as it was described to Blue, could fully see Orla’s long, elegant neck; her classic cheekbones; her romantic, heavy-lidded eyes; and her massive nose — her least favorite feature. Orla had broken up with him immediately.

"Blue?" the woman asked. "Blue Sargent?"

At first, Blue didn’t understand that she meant that the flowers were for her. The woman had to thrust them toward her, and then Calla had to take back one of her bags in order for Blue to be able to accept them. As the woman headed back to her car, Blue turned the arrangement in her hand.

Calla commented, "The delivery must’ve cost more than the flowers."

Feeling around the wiry stems, Blue found a little card. Inside, a woman’s scrawl had transcribed a message which Calla read:

I hope you still want me to talk. — Adam

Now the tiny bunch of flowers made sense.

"And you’re smiling," Calla said disapprovingly. She held a hand out for them, which Blue smacked. With sarcasm, Calla added, "Why is Adam sending you flowers?”

“He and I wanted to be friends with one another before I knew he was friends with Gansey.”

“From that incident at Nico’s.” Calla stated in reply to a question she never asked.

"Calla?" Blue asked. "Do you think I should tell the boys where the corpse road is?"

Calla gazed at Blue for as long as a Neeve gaze. Then she said, "What makes you think I can answer that question?"

"Because you’re an adult," Blue replied. "And you’re supposed to have learned things on your way to old age."

"What I think," Calla said, "is that you’ve already made up your mind."

Blue dropped her eyes to the ground. It was true that she was kept awake at night by Gansey’s journal and by the suggestion of something more to the world. It was also true that she was dogged by the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a sleeping king and she would be able to lay her hand on his sleeping cheek and feel a centuries-old pulse beneath his skin.

But more important than either of those was that page of cups card, a boy’s _aura_ in the churchyard, and a voice saying, Gansey. That’s all there is.

Once she’d seen his death laid out for him, and seen that he was real, and found out that she was meant to have a part in it, there had never been a chance she would just stand by and let it happen.

"Don’t tell Mom," Blue said.

With a noncommittal grunt, Calla wrenched open the door, leaving Blue and her flowers on the step. The blossoms weighed nothing at all, but to Blue, they felt like change.

Today, Blue thought, is the day I stop listening to the future and start living it instead.

"Blue, if you get to know him —" Calla started. She was standing half-in, half-out of the doorway. "You’d better guard your heart. Don’t forget that he’s going to die."


	22. Chapter 22

At the same time that his flowers were being delivered to 300 Fox Way, Adam arrived at Monmouth Manufacturing on his somewhat pathetic bicycle. Ronan and Noah were already out in the overgrown lot, building wooden ramps for some unholy purpose.

He tried twice to persuade his rusted kickstand to hold his bike up before laying it down on its side. Crabgrass poked up through the spokes. He asked, "When do you think Gansey will get here?"

Ronan didn’t immediately answer him. He was lying as far beneath the BMW as he could, measuring the width of the tires with a yellow hardware-store ruler. "Ten inches, Noah."

Noah, standing next to a pile of plywood and four-by-fours, asked, "Is that all? That doesn’t seem like very much."

"Would I lie to you? Ten. Inches." Ronan shoved himself from beneath the car and stared up at Adam. He’d let his five o’clock shadow become a multiday shadow, probably to spite Gansey’s inability to grow facial hair. Now he looked like the sort of person women would hide their purses and babies from. "Who knows. When did he say?"

"Three."

Ronan climbed to his feet and they both turned to watch Noah working with the plywood for the ramps. Working with really meant staring at. Noah had his fingers held ten inches apart and he looked through the space between them to the wood below, perplexed. There were no tools in sight.

"What is your plan with these things anyway?" Adam asked.

Ronan smiled his lizard smile. "Ramp. BMW. The goddamn moon."

This was so like Ronan. His room inside Monmouth was filled with expensive toys, but, like a spoiled child, he ended up playing outside with sticks.

"The trajectory you’re building doesn’t suggest the moon," Adam replied. "It suggests the end of your suspension."

"I don’t need your back talk, science guy."

He probably didn’t. Ronan didn’t need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted. Crouching by his bike, Adam messed over the kickstand again, trying to see if he could pry it free without breaking it entirely.

"What’s your malfunction, anyway?" Ronan asked.

"I’m trying to decide when I should talk to Blue." Saying it out loud was inviting ridicule from Ronan, but it was one of those facts that needed to be acknowledged.

Noah said, "He sent her flowers."

"How did you know?" Adam demanded, more mortified than curious.

Noah merely smiled in a far-off way. He kicked one of the wooden boards off the plywood, looking triumphant.

"To the psychic’s? You know what that place was?" Ronan asked. "A castration palace. You date that girl, you should send her your nuts instead of flowers."

"You’re a Neanderthal."

"Sometimes you sound just like Gansey," Ronan said.

"Sometimes you don’t."

Noah laughed his breathy, nearly soundless laugh. Ronan spit on the ground beside the BMW.

"I didn’t even realize that ‘midget’ was the Adam Parrish type," he said.

He wasn’t being serious, but Adam was, all at once, fatigued with Ronan and his uselessness. Since the day of the fistfight at Nino’s, Ronan had already gotten several notices in his student box at Aglionby, warning him of the dire things slated to befall him if he didn’t begin to improve his grades. If he didn’t begin attempting to get grades. Instead, Ronan was out here building ramps.

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swaths of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.

Two years earlier, Adam had made his decision to come to Aglionby, and, in his head, it was sort of because of Ronan. His mother had sent him to the grocery store with her bank card — all that had been on the conveyer belt was a tube of toothpaste and four cans of microwave ravioli — and the cashier had just told him there were insufficient funds in her bank account to cover the purchase. Though it was not his failing, there was something peculiarly humiliating and intimate about the moment, hunched at the head of a shopping line, turning out his pockets to pretend he might have the cash to cover instead. While he fumbled there, a shaved-headed boy at the next register moved swiftly through, swiping a credit card and collecting his things in only a few seconds.

Even the way the other boy had moved, Adam recalled, had struck him: confident and careless, shoulders rolled back, chin tilted, an emperor’s son. As the cashier swiped Adam’s card again, both of them pretending the machine might have misread the magnetic stripe, Adam watched the other boy go out to the curb to where a shiny black car waited. When the boy opened the door, Adam saw the other two boys inside wore raven-breasted sweaters and ties. They were despicably carefree as they divvied up the drinks.

He’d had to leave the boxes and the toothpaste on the conveyer belt, eyes hot with shamed tears that wouldn’t fall.

He’d never wanted to be someone else so badly.

In his head, that boy was Ronan, but in retrospect, Adam thought it couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t have been old enough to have his driver’s license yet. It was just some other Aglionby student with a working credit card and exquisite car. And also, that day wasn’t the only reason he’d decided to fight to come to Aglionby. But it was the catalyst. The imagined memory of Ronan, careless and shallow but with pride fully intact, and Adam, cowed and humiliated while a line of old ladies waited behind him.

He still wasn’t that other boy at the register. But he was closer.

Adam looked at his battered old watch to see how late Gansey was. He told Ronan, "Give me your phone."

With a raised eyebrow, Ronan retrieved the phone from the roof of the BMW.

Adam punched in the psychic’s number. It rang just twice, and then a breathy voice said, "Adam?"

Startled at the sound of his name, Adam replied, "Blue?"

"No," the voice said. "Persephone." Then, to someone in the background, "Ten dollars, Orla. That was the bet. No, the caller ID doesn’t say anything at all. See?" Then, back to Adam, "Sorry about that. I’m terrible when there’s competition involved. You’re the Coca-Cola T-shirt one, right?"

It took Adam a moment to realize that she meant the shirt he’d worn to the reading. "Oh, um. Yeah."

"How wonderful. I’ll go get Blue."

There was a brief, uncomfortable moment while voices murmured in the background of the telephone. Adam swatted at gnats; the parking lot needed to be mowed again. The asphalt was hard to see in some places.

"I didn’t think you’d call. I thought you’d visit me at Nico’s," Blue said.

Adam must not have truly expected to get Blue on the phone, because the surprise he felt when he heard her voice made his stomach feel hollowed out. Ronan was smirking in a way that made him want to punch his arm.

"I said I wanted to talk with you again."

"Thanks for the flowers. They felt beautiful." Then she hissed: "Orla, get out of here! I can hear you that’s how!"

"It seems busy there."

"It’s always busy here. There are three hundred and forty-two people who live here, and they all want to be in this room. What are you doing today?" She asked it very naturally, like it was the most logical thing in the world for them to have a conversation on the phone, like they were already friends.

It made it easier for Adam to say, "Exploring. Do you want to come with?"

Ronan’s eyes widened. No matter what she said now, the phone call had been worth it for the genuine shock on Ronan’s face.

"What sort of exploring?"

Shielding his eyes, Adam lifted his eyes to the sky. He thought he could hear Gansey coming. "Mountains. How do you feel about helicopters?"

There was a long pause. "How do you mean? Ethically?"

"As a mode of transportation."

"Faster than camels, but less sustainable. Is there going to be a helicopter in your future today?"

"Yeah. Gansey wants to look for the ley line, and they’re usually easier to spot from the air."

"And of course he just … got a helicopter."

"He’s Gansey."

There was another long pause. It was a thinking pause, Adam thought, so he didn’t interrupt it. Finally, Blue said, "Okay, I’ll come.”

Adam replied truthfully, "Fantastic."


	23. Chapter 23

It was remarkably easy to disobey Maura.

Maura Sargent had very little experience disciplining children, and Blue had very little experience being disciplined, so there was nothing to stop Blue from going with Adam when he met her in front of the house. She didn’t even feel guilty, yet, because she had no practice in that, either. Really, the most remarkable thing about the entire situation was how hopeful she felt, against all odds. She was going against her mother’s wishes, meeting with a boy, meeting with a raven boy. She should’ve been dreading it.

But it was very difficult to imagine Adam as a raven boy as he greeted her, his hands neatly in his pockets, scented with the dusty odor of mown grass.

"You look nice," he said, walking with her down the sidewalk.

She was uncertain if he was being serious. She wore heavy boots she’d found at the Goodwill (she’d attacked them with embroidery thread and a very sturdy needle) and a dress she’d made, with some help, a few months earlier, constructed from several different layers of green fabric. Some of them striped. Some of them crochet. Some of them transparent. Or so she was told. The two of them did not, Blue mused with delight, look anything like a couple.

"Thanks," she replied. "Don’t take this the wrong way," Blue replied. Her cheeks felt a little warm, but she was well into this conversation and she couldn’t back down now. "Because I know you’re going to think I feel bad about it, and I don’t."

"All right."

"Because I’m not the type of girl that Aglionby boys seem to like."

"I go to Aglionby," Adam said.

Adam did not seem to go to Aglionby like other boys went to Aglionby.

"I like you just fine and I want to be friends with you," he said.

When he said it, she heard his Henrietta accent for the first time that day: a long vowel and pretty like it rhymed with biddy. In a nearby tree, a cardinal went wheek. wheek. wheek. Adam’s sneakers scuffed on the sidewalk. Blue considered what he had said, and then she considered it some more.

"Thanks," she said finally. She felt like when she’d first heard his card being read to her along with the smell of flowers. “I think I want to be your friend, too."

He laughed his surprised laugh.

"I have another question," Blue said. "Do you remember the last thing my mother said to Gansey?"

His silence made it clear that he did.

"Right." Blue took a deep breath. "She said she wouldn’t help. But I didn’t."

After he’d called, she’d hastily used psychography on an unspecific map to outline the corpse road or ley lines as the Raven boys had taken to calling it. It was just a few scratched parallel lines to indicate the main road, some spidery named cross streets, and finally, a square hopefully labeled THE CHURCH. The main road ley line hopefully ran through the Blue Ridge Mountains and forest to connect with the Church, like how see _saw_ it.

She handed Adam this map. Then, from her bag, she handed him Gansey’s journal.

Adam stopped walking. Blue, a few feet ahead of him, waited as he frowned at the things in his hands. He held the journal very carefully, like it was important to him, or perhaps like it was important to someone who was important to him. Desperately she wanted him to both trust her and respect her, and she could tell from his face that she didn’t have much time to accomplish either.

"Gansey left that at Nino’s," she said quickly. "The book. I know I should’ve given it back at the reading, but my mom … well, you saw her. She doesn’t normally — she isn’t normally like that. I didn’t know what to think. Here’s the thing. I want to be in on this thing, that you guys are doing. Like, if there really is something supernatural going on, I want to _see_ it. That’s all."

Adam merely asked, "Why?"

With him, there was never any option but the truth, said as simply as possible. She didn’t think he would stand for anything else. "I’m the only person in my family who’s blind. You heard my mom; I make things easier for people who are psychic and can see. If magic exists, I just want to _see_ it. Just once."

"You’re as bad as Gansey," Adam said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought that was very bad at all. "He doesn’t need anything but to know it’s real."

"That’s the way to the corpse ro — the ley line," she explained, vaguely gesturing at her scratchy map. "The church is on the ley line."

"You’re sure?"

Blue gave him a deeply withering look. "Look, either you’re going to believe me or not. I’ll explain more when we meet the others. You’re the one who asked me along. ‘Exploring’!"

Adam seemed amused by her outburst, "So you don’t do anything quiet, do you?"

The way he said it, she could tell that he was impressed with her in the way that men were usually impressed with Orla. Blue very much liked that, especially since she hadn’t had to do anything other than be herself to earn it. "Nothing worth doing."

"Well," he said, "I think you’ll find I do pretty much everything quiet. If you can be all right with that, I guess we’ll be fine."

It turned out that she had walked or was driven past Gansey’s apartment every single day of the year, on the way to school and to Nino’s. As they walked, with Adam holding her arm so she didn’t use her cane, toward the massive warehouse, she listened as Adam described the fiendishly orange glint of the Camaro in the overgrown parking lot and, only a hundred yards away, a glistening navy-blue helicopter.

She hadn’t really believed the part about the helicopter on their phone call. Not in a way that prepared her for actually experiencing a life-sized helicopter, sitting in a lot, like someone would park an SUV.

Blue stopped in her tracks and breathed, "Whew."

"I know," Adam said.

And here, again, was Gansey, and again Blue had a strange shock of reconciling the image of him as a spirit and the reality of him beside a helicopter.

"Finally!" he shouted, jogging out toward them. Unknown to Blue he was still wearing those idiotic Top-Siders she’d noticed at the reading, this time paired with cargo shorts and a yellow polo shirt that made it look as if he were prepared for any sort of emergency, so long as the emergency involved him falling onto a yacht. In his hand he held a container of organic apple juice.

He pointed his no-pesticides juice at Blue. "Are you coming with?"

Blue answered, "Yes."

Gansey slung a burnished leather backpack over his burnished cotton shoulders. His smile was gracious and inclusive, as if her mother hadn’t recently refused to assist him in any way. "Excellent.”

Behind him, the helicopter began to roar to life. Adam stretched out the journal to Gansey, who appeared startled.

"Where was it?" yelled Gansey.

And he had to yell. Now that it was running, the blades of the helicopter didn’t so much roar as scream. Air beat against Blue’s ears, more feeling than sound.

Adam pointed at Blue.

"Thanks," Gansey shouted back. It was a default answer, he fell back onto his powerful politeness when he was taken by surprise. Also, he was still watching Adam, taking his cues from him as to how he should react to her. Adam nodded, once, briefly, and the mask slipped just a little more. Blue wondered if the President Cell Phone demeanor ever vanished completely when he was around his friends. Maybe the Gansey she’d _seen_ in the churchyard was what lay beneath.

That was a sobering thought.

The air rumbled around them. Blue felt like her dress would fly away. She asked, "Is this thing safe?"

"Safe as life," Gansey replied. "Adam, we’re behind schedule! Blue, if you’re coming, tighten your liberty bodice and come on." As he ducked to approach the helicopter, his shirt, too, flapped against his back.

Blue was suddenly a little nervous. It wasn’t that she was scared, exactly. It was just that she hadn’t psychologically prepared herself for leaving the ground with a bunch of raven boys when she’d woken up this morning. The helicopter, for all its size and noise, seemed like a pretty insubstantial thing to trust her life to, and the boys felt like strangers. Now, it felt like she was truly disobeying Maura.

"I’ve never flown," she confessed to Adam, a shout to be heard over the whine of the helicopter.

"Ever?" Adam shouted back.

She shook her head. He put his mouth right against her ear so that she could hear him. He smelled like summer and cheap shampoo.

"I’ve flown once," he replied. He added, "I hated it."

She felt him take her hand so that they were no longer linking elbows. His palm was sweaty. He really did hate flying.

At the door to the helicopter, Gansey looked back over his shoulder at them, his smile complicated when he saw them holding hands.

"I hate this," Adam shouted at Gansey. His cheeks were red.

"I know," Gansey yelled back.

Inside the helicopter, there was room for three passengers on a bench seat in the back, and one in a utilitarian seat beside the pilot. The interior would have resembled the backseat of a really big car if the seat belts hadn’t had five-point fasteners that looked like they belonged in an X-wing fighter. Blue didn’t like to think why passengers had to be strapped down so securely; possibly they were expecting people to be bounced against the walls.

Ronan, the raven boy who was more raven boy than the others, was already installed in a window seat. He didn’t smile when he looked up. Adam, punching Ronan’s arm, took the middle seat, while Blue took the remaining window seat. As she felt Adam toy with her seat belt straps, fastening and securing them for her.

A few minutes later, when Gansey climbed into the front seat beside the pilot, she _sensed_ that he was incredibly excited to be going wherever they were going. It was some private joy that she managed to be in on by virtue of being in the helicopter and, just like that, Blue was excited, too.

Adam leaned toward her as if he was about to say something, but ultimately, he just shook his head, smiling, like Gansey was a joke that was too complicated to explain.

In front, Gansey turned to the pilot, who surprised Blue a little — a young woman with an impressively straight nose, her brown hair swept into a beautiful knot, headphones clamping down any loose strands. She seemed to find Blue and Adam’s proximity far more interesting than Gansey had.

The pilot shouted at Gansey, "Aren’t you going to introduce us, Dick?"

"Blue," he said, "I’d like you to meet my sister, Helen."


	24. Chapter 24

There wasn’t much Gansey didn’t like about flying. He liked airports, with their masses of people all doing things, and he liked planes, with their thick-paned windows and fold-out trays. The way that a jet charged down a runway reminded him of how the Camaro pressed him back in the driver’s seat when he hit the gas. The whine of a helicopter sounded like productivity. He liked the little knobs and toggles and gauges of cockpits, and he liked the technological backwardness of the simple clasp seat belts. Gansey derived a large part of his pleasure from meeting goals, and a large part of that large part was pleased by meeting goals efficiently. There was nothing more efficient than aiming for your destination as the crow flew.

And of course, from one thousand feet, Henrietta took Gansey’s breath away.

Below them, the surface of the world was deeply green, and cutting through the green was a narrow, shining river, a mirror to the sky. He could follow it with his eyes all the way to the mountains.

Now that they were in the air, Gansey was feeling a little anxious. With Blue here, he was beginning to feel as if possibly he’d overdone it with the helicopter. He wondered if it would make Blue feel better or worse to know that it was Helen’s helicopter, that he hadn’t paid anything today for the use of it. Probably worse. Remembering his vow to at least do no harm with his words, he kept his mouth shut.

"There she is," Helen’s voice reported directly into Gansey’s ears; in the helicopter, they all wore headsets to allow them to converse through the ceaseless noise of the blades and the engine. "Gansey’s girlfriend."

Ronan’s snort barely made it through his headset, but Gansey had heard it often enough to know it was there.

"She must be pretty big to see her from up here." The blind girl joked.

"Henrietta," Helen replied. She peered to the left of the helicopter as she banked. "They’re getting married. They haven’t set a date yet."

"If you’re going to embarrass me, I’ll throw you out and fly myself," Gansey said from the seat beside her. This was not a true threat. Not only would he not push Helen out at this altitude, he wasn’t legal to fly without her. Also, truth be told, he wasn’t very good at flying a helicopter, despite several lessons. He seemed to lack the important ability to orient himself vertically as well as horizontally, which led to disagreements involving trees. He comforted himself with the knowledge that, at least, he could parallel park very well.

"Did you get Mom a birthday present?" Helen asked.

"Yes," Gansey replied. "Myself."

Helen said, "The gift that keeps on giving."

He said, "I don’t think that minor children are required to get gifts for their parents. I’m a dependent. That’s the definition of dependent, is it not?"

"You, a dependent!" his sister said, and laughed. Helen had a laugh like a cartoon character: Ha ha ha ha! It was an intimidating laugh that tended to make men suspect that they were possibly the brunt of it. "You haven’t been a dependent since you were four. You went straight from kindergarten to old man with a studio apartment."

Gansey made a dismissive hand gesture. His sister was known for hyperbole. "What did you get her?"

"It’s a surprise," Helen replied loftily, tapping some sort of toggle switch with a pink-nailed finger. The pink was the only fanciful thing about her. Helen was beautiful in the way a supercomputer was beautiful: sleek with elegant but utilitarian styling, full of top-notch technological know-how, far too expensive for most people to possess.

"That means it’s glassware."

Gansey’s mother collected rare painted plates with the same obsessive fervor that Gansey collected facts about Glendower. He had a hard time seeing the allure of a plate robbed of its original purpose, but his mother’s collection had been featured in magazines and was insured for more than his father, so clearly she was not alone in her passion.

Helen was stony. "I don’t want to hear it. You didn’t get her anything."

"I didn’t say anything about it!"

"You called it glassware."

He asked, "What should I have said?"

"They’re not all glass. This one I’ve found her is not glass."

"Then she won’t like it."

Helen’s face shifted from stony to very stony. She glowered at her GPS. Gansey didn’t like to think of how much time she’d invested in her non-glass plate. He didn’t like to see either of the women in his family disappointed; it ruined perfectly good meals.

Helen was still silent, so Gansey began to think about Blue. Something about her was discomfiting him, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. It wasn’t that she was blind, he knew that. Taking a mint leaf from his pocket, Gansey put it into his mouth and watched the familiar Henrietta roads snake below them. From the air, the curves looked less perilous than they felt in the Camaro. What was it about Blue? Adam was not suspicious of her, and he was suspicious of everyone. But then again, he was clearly enchanted by her. Not infatuated. That, too, was unfamiliar ground for Gansey.

"Adam," he said. There was no answer, and Gansey looked over his shoulder. Adam’s headphones were looped around his neck, and he was leaned over beside Blue, pointing something out on the ground below. Probably describing as best as he could what there was to see. As she’d shifted, Blue’s dress had gotten hitched up and Gansey could see a long, slender triangle of her thigh. Adam’s hand was braced a few inches away on the seat, knuckles pale with his hatred of flying. There was nothing particularly intimate about the way they sat, but something about the scene made Gansey feel strange, like he’d heard an unpleasant statement and later forgotten everything about the words but the way they had made him feel.

"Adam!" Gansey shouted.

His friend’s head jerked up, face startled. He hurried to pull his headset back on. His voice came through the headphones. "Are you done talking about your mom’s plates?"

"Very. Where should we go this time? I was thinking maybe back to the church where I recorded the voice."

Adam handed Gansey a wrinkled piece of paper.

Gansey flattened the paper and found a crude map. "What’s this?"

"Blue."

Gansey looked at her intently, trying to decide if she had anything to gain by misdirecting them. Not that Blue could tell or anything. Turning back around, he spread the paper flat on the controls in front of him. "Make that happen, Helen."

Helen banked to follow the new direction. The church Blue directed them toward was probably forty minutes’ drive from Henrietta, but as the bird flew, it was only fifteen. Without a quiet noise from Blue, Gansey would’ve missed it. It was a ruin, hollowed and overgrown. A narrow line of an old, old stone wall was visible around it, as well as an impression on the ground where an additional wall must have originally been. "That’s it?"

"That’s all there is left."

Something inside Gansey went very still and quiet.

He said, "What did you say?"

"It’s a ruin, but —"

"No," he said. "Say precisely what you said before. Please."

Blue shifted her sightless gaze onto Gansey. "I don’t remember what I said. Was it … That’s all there is?"

That’s all.

Is that all?

That was what had been nagging him all this time. He knew he recognized her voice. He knew that Henrietta accent, he knew that cadence.

It was Blue’s voice on the recorder.

Gansey.

Is that all?

That’s all there is.

"I’m not made out of fuel," Helen snapped, as if she’d already said it once, and Gansey had missed it. Maybe he had. "Tell me where to go from here."

What does this mean? Once more, he began to feel the press of responsibility, awe, something bigger than him. At once he was anticipatory and afraid.

"Blue, do you know anything?” Adam asked.

Blue, who had her thumb and forefinger pressed against the glass as if she was measuring something, answered, "Are we near the mountains and two oak trees?”

Everyone was bewildered at the blind psychic’s accuracy. Adam confirmed that there was, and she continued, “There then. The church is one point, and another point is right between the trees. If we make a straight line between those two, that’s the path."

If it had been Blue he’d been talking to on St. Mark’s Eve, what did that mean?

"Are you certain?" This was Helen, in her brisk supercomputer voice. "I only have an hour and a half of fuel."

Blue sounded a little indignant. "I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t sure."

Helen smiled faintly and pushed the helicopter in the direction Blue had indicated.

"Blue."

It was Ronan’s voice, for the first time, and everyone, even Helen, twisted their heads toward him. His head was cocked in a way that Gansey recognized as dangerous. Something in his eyes was sharp as he stared at Blue. He asked, "Do you know Gansey?"

Gansey remembered Ronan leaning against the Pig, playing the recording over and over again.

Blue looked defensive under their stares. She said reluctantly, "Only his name."

With his fingers linked loosely together, elbows on his knees, Ronan leaned forward across Adam to be closer to Blue. He could be unbelievably threatening.

"And how is it," he asked, "you came to know Gansey’s name?"

To her credit, Blue didn’t back down. Hard for her to be intimidated by what she couldn’t see, but she said, "First of all, get out of my face."

"What if I don’t?"

"Ronan," said Gansey.

Ronan sat back.

"I would like to know, though," Gansey said. His heart felt like it weighed nothing at all.

Looking down, Blue bunched a few of the layers of her improbable dress in her hands. Finally, she said, "I guess that’s fair." She turned to Ronan. She looked angry. "But that is not the way to get me to answer anything. Next time he gets in my face, I let you find this thing on your own. I’ll — look. I’ll tell you how I knew your name, even how I know about the trees, if you explain to me what that shape is that you have in your journal. The three intersecting lines."

"Tell me why we’re negotiating with terrorists?" Ronan asked.

"Since when am I a terrorist?" demanded Blue. "Seems to me I came bringing something you guys wanted and you’re being dicks."

"Not all of us," Adam said.

"I am not being a dick," Gansey said. He was uncomfortable with the idea that she might not like him. "Now, what is this thing you want to know?"

Blue reached her hand out. "The lines. You doodled them in that journal of yours."

"They’re ley lines." He stretched out a hand for the journal. For a strange, hyperaware moment, he realized how closely she watched him as he took it. He didn’t think it missed her notice how his left hand curved familiarly around the leather binding, how the thumb and finger on his right hand knew just how much pressure to apply to coax the pages to spread where he wanted them to. The journal and Gansey were clearly long-acquainted, and he wanted her to know.

This is me. The real me.

He didn’t want to analyze the source of this impulse too hard. He focused on flipping through the journal instead. It took him no time at all to find the desired page — a map of the United States, marked all over with curving lines.

He traced a finger over one line that stretched through New York City and Washington, D.C. Another intersecting line that stretched from Boston to St. Louis. A third that cut horizontally across the first two, stretching through Virginia and Kentucky and on west. There was, as always, something satisfying about tracing the lines, something that called to mind scavenger hunts and childhood drawings.

"These are the three main lines," Gansey said. "The ones that seem to matter."

"Seem to matter how?"

He continued, "The ones that seem to matter as far as finding Glendower. That line across Virginia is the one that connects us to the UK. The United Kingdom.” Gansey paused before continuing, “Those other two lines have a lot of reports of unusual sightings on them. Of … paranormal stuff. Poltergeists and Mothmen and black dogs."

But his hesitation was unnecessary; Blue didn’t scoff.

"I drew that shape," she said. "The ley lines. So did Nee — one of the other women here. We didn’t know what it was, though, only that it would be significant. That’s why I wanted to know."

"Now you," Ronan said to Blue.

"I — _saw_ Gansey’s spirit," she said. "I may be blind but that does not mean I can’t see. At least through other means. Being born into a family of psychics has its benefits. As best as I can describe it, I see _auras_ of living things. These _auras_ outline a person or other living thing.”

“Bullshit.” Ronan exclaimed.

“This again? Really?” Blue heaved a sigh, “Fine. All three of you hold up as many fingers as you want. Make a gesture even.”

All three boys did, Gansey held up three fingers, Ronan held up his middle fingers, Adam made the “okay” and “peace” gesture.

“Gansey is holding up three fingers, Ronan is flipping me off with both of his hands. Classy by the way, asshole. Adam is making these gestures.” Blue then mimicked what Adam held up. “I’d describe the scenery too, but I feel like you’ll just pin that on Adam previously describing it to me. Henrietta is a powerful place for psychics, and something here enables me to see. Now, back to the more important matter. I have never been able to _see_ the dead. I can _sense_ them. I don’t see their _auras_ , but this time, I did. I asked you your name, and you told me. ‘Gansey. That’s all there is.’ Honestly, it’s part of the reason why I wanted to come along today."

This answer satisfied Gansey fairly well — she was, after all, the daughter of a psychic, and it matched the account his recorder gave — though it struck him. A blind psychic can _see_. Ronan demanded, "Saw him where?"

"While I was sitting outside the church on St. Mark's Eve with my half aunt. I don’t believe he was dead. If he was, then I wouldn’t have been able to _see_ him. There was something more going on and I want to find out what."

This seemed to satisfy Ronan as well, because he asked, "What’s the other half of her?"

"God, Ronan," Adam said. "Enough."

There was a moment of tense silence, occupied only by the continuous droning whine of the helicopter. They were waiting, Gansey knew, for his verdict. Did he believe her answer, did he think they should follow her directions, did he trust her?

Her voice was on the recorder. He felt like he didn’t have a choice. What he was thinking, but didn’t want to say with Helen listening in, was, You’re right, Ronan, it’s starting, something’s starting. He was also thinking, Tell me what you think of her, Adam. Tell me why you trust her. Don’t make me decide for once. I don’t know if I’m right. But what he said was, "I’m going to need everyone to be straight with each other from now on. No more games. This isn’t just for Blue, either. All of us."

Ronan said, "I’m always straight."

Adam replied, "Oh, man, that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told."

Blue said, "Okay."

Gansey suspected that none of them was being completely honest with their replies, but at least he’d told them what he wanted. Sometimes all he could hope for was getting it on the record.

The headsets fell silent as Adam, Ronan, and Gansey all stared intently out the window. Blue relaxing back into her seat.

"What are we looking for?" Helen asked.

Gansey said, "The usual."

"What’s ‘the usual’?" Blue asked.

The usual more often than not turned out to be acres of nothing, but Gansey said, "Sometimes, the ley lines are marked in ways that are visible from the air. Like in the UK, some of the lines are marked with horses carved into hillsides."

He’d been in a small fixed-wing plane with Malory the first time that he’d seen the Uffington Horse, a three-hundred-foot horse scraped into the side of an English chalk hill. Like everything associated with the ley lines, the horse was not quite … ordinary. The horse was stretched and stylized, an elegant, eerie silhouette that was more suggestion of a horse than actual horse.

"Tell her about Nazca," murmured Adam.

"Oh, right," Gansey said. Even though Blue had read much of the journal, there was a lot that wasn’t in it, and unlike Ronan and Adam and Noah, she hadn’t lived this life for the past year. It was suddenly difficult not to be excited by the idea of explaining it all to her. The story always sounded more plausible when he laid all of the facts out at once.

He continued, "In Peru, there are hundreds of lines cut into the ground in the shapes of things like birds and monkeys and men and imaginary creatures. Thousands of years old, but they only make sense from the air. From an airplane. They’re too big to see from the ground. When you’re standing next to them, they just look like scraped footpaths."

"You’ve seen them in person," Blue said.

When Gansey had seen the Nazca Lines for himself, massive and strange and symmetrical, he’d known that he wouldn’t be able to give up until he found Glendower. The scale of the lines was what had struck him first — hundreds upon hundreds of feet of curious drawings in the middle of the desert. He’d been stunned by the precision. The drawings were mathematical in their perfection, faultless in their symmetry. And the last thing to hit him, right in his gut, was the emotional impact, a mysterious, raw ache that wouldn’t go away. Gansey felt like he couldn’t survive not knowing if the lines meant something.

That was the only part of his hunt for Glendower that he could never seem to explain to people.

"Gansey," Adam said. "What’s that, there?"

The helicopter slowed as all four passengers craned their necks. By now, they were deep into the mountains, and the ground had risen to meet them. All around them were rippling flanks of mysterious green forests, a rolling dark sea from above. Among the slopes and gullies, however, was a slanting, green-carpeted field marked by a pale fracture of lines.

"Does it make a shape?" he asked. "Helen, stop. Stop!"

"Do you think this is a bicycle?" demanded Helen, but the helicopter’s forward progress stopped.

"Look," Adam said. "There’s a wing, there. And there, a beak. A bird?"

"No," Ronan said, voice cold and even. "Not just a bird. It’s a raven."

Slowly the form became clear to Gansey, emerging from the overgrown grass: a bird, yes, neck twisted backward, and wings pressed as if in a book. Tail feathers splayed and claws simplified.

Ronan was right. Even stylized, the dome of the head, the generous curve of the beak, and the ruffle of feathers on its neck made the bird unmistakably a raven.

His skin prickled.

"Put the helicopter down," Gansey said immediately.

Helen replied, "I can’t land on private property."

He cast an entreating gaze at his sister. He needed to write down the GPS coordinates. He needed to take a photo for his records. He needed to sketch the shape of it in his journal. More than anything, he needed to touch the lines of the bird and make it real in his head. "Helen, two seconds."

Her return look was knowing; it was the sort of condescending look that might have caused arguments when he was younger and more easily riled. "If the landowner discovers me there and decides to press charges, I could lose my license."

"Two seconds. You saw. There’s no one around here for miles and miles, no houses."

Helen’s gaze was very level. "I’m supposed to be at Mom and Dad’s in two hours."

"Two seconds."

Finally, she rolled her eyes and sat back in her seat. Shaking her head, she turned back toward the controls.

"Thank you, Helen," Adam said.

"Two seconds," she repeated grimly. "If you aren’t done by then, I’m taking off without you."

The helicopter landed fifteen feet away from the strange raven’s heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://deimosovid.tumblr.com/post/619095953950048256/this-is-what-i-imagine-blue-looks-like
> 
> That's what I imagine Blue looks like.


	25. Chapter 25

As soon as the helicopter had touched down, Gansey leapt from the cabin and strode into the thigh-high grass as if he owned the place, Ronan by his side. Through the open door of the helo, Blue heard him say Noah’s name to the phone before repeating the GPS coordinates for the field. He was energized and powerful, a king in his castle.

Blue, on the other hand, was a little slower. For a multitude of reasons, her legs felt a little gelled after flying. She wasn’t sure if telling Gansey the entire truth about St. Mark’s Eve was the right decision or that she can _see_ , and she was worried about Ronan trying to speak to her again. Adam helped her out of the helicopter.

It smelled wonderful in the middle of this field, though — all grass and trees and, somewhere, water, and lots of it. Blue thought she might live here quite happily. Adam had taken her hand again and she considered how much she liked it.

With some surprise, Adam said, "Those lines are pretty invisible from here." He was partially right about this. The lines may be invisible to them, but to Blue, she could _sense_ them thrumming all around them. "I still hate flying. Sorry about Ronan."

"The flying part wasn’t bad," Blue said. Actually, aside from Ronan, she had kind of liked it — the sense of floating in a very noisy bubble where all directions were possible. "I thought it would be worse. You sort of have to give up control, don’t you, and then it’s okay. Now, Ronan …"

"He’s a pit bull," Adam said.

"I know some really nice pit bulls." One of the neighborhood dogs Blue had the pleasure of being able to pet.

"He’s the kind of pit that makes the evening news. Gansey’s trying to retrain him."

"How noble."

"It makes him feel better about being Gansey."

Blue didn’t doubt it. "Sometimes he’s very condescending."

Adam looked at the ground. "He doesn’t mean to be. It’s all that blue blood in his veins."

He was about to say something else when a shout interrupted him.

"ARE YOU LISTENING, GLENDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!" Gansey’s voice, ebullient and ringing, echoed off the tree-covered slopes around the field. Adam and Blue found him standing in the middle of a clear, pale path, his arms stretched out and his head tilted back as he shouted into the air. Adam’s mouth made the soundless shape of a laugh.

Gansey grinned at them both. He was hard to resist in this form: glowing with rows and rows of white teeth, a college brochure in the making.

"Oyster shells," he said, leaning to pick up one of the pale objects that made up the path. The fragment was pure white, the edges blunt and worn. "That’s what makes up the raven. Like they use for roads down in the tidewater area. Oyster shells on bare rock. What do you think of that?"

"I think that’s a lot of oyster shells to bring from the coast," Adam replied. "I also think Glendower would’ve come from the coast, too."

Gansey pointed at Adam by way of a reply.

Blue put her free hand on her hip. "So you think they put Glendower’s body on a boat in Wales, sailed over to Virginia, then brought him up to the mountains. Why?"

"Energy," Gansey replied. Rummaging in his bag, he removed a small black box that looked a lot like a very small car battery.

Blue asked, "What are you doing now?"

He twiddled with switches on the side as he explained, "An electromagnetic-frequency meter. It monitors energy levels. Some people use them for ghost hunting. It’s supposed to have a high reading when you’re near a spirit. But it’s also supposed to read high when you’re near an energy source. Like a ley line."

She scowled. A box to register magic seemed to insult both the box holder and magic. "And why are we using your electromagnorific button thing?"

Gansey held the meter above his head as if he were calling aliens. "You find it not normal?"

She could tell that he very much wanted her to say that it wasn’t normal, so she replied, "Oh, I’m sure it’s quite normal in some circles. But that’s not why I asked. You have a blind psychic that can _see_ energy with you, but sure use your magic box."

Blue took off with Adam, striding through the grass following something only she and a box could _sense_. Adam kindly ensured that she faced little resistance as she guided them towards something by stopping her to move aside foliage and the like. Gansey trailing along with them, but most of his attention was on the meter, which showed two faint red lights. Both the device and the girl led to the raven’s beak. He remarked, "So, like I said, energy. One of the other names for the ley line is corpse—"

"Corpse road," Blue interrupted. "I know."

He looked pleased and magnanimous, as if she were a prize pupil. "So school me. You probably know better than I."

"I know that the dead travel in straight lines," she said. "That people used to carry corpses in straight lines to churches to bury them. Along what you call the ley line. It was supposed to be really bad to take them any other route than the way they’d choose to travel as a spirit."

"Right," he said. "So it stands to reason there’s something about the line that fortifies or protects a corpse. The soul. The … animus. The quiddity of it."

"Gansey, seriously," Adam interrupted, to Blue’s relief. "Nobody knows what quiddity is."

"The whatness, Adam. Whatever it is that makes a person what they are. If they removed Glendower from the corpse road, I think the magic that keeps him asleep would be disrupted."

She said, "Basically, you mean he would die for good if he was removed from the line."

"Yes," Gansey said.

She asked, "And why not just leave him in Wales? Isn’t that where they want him to wake up and be a hero?"

"It was an uprising, and he was a traitor to the English crown," Gansey said. "Glendower fought the English for years, and it was ugly, all struggle between noble families with mixed allegiances. The Welsh resistance failed. Glendower disappeared. If the English had known where he was, dead or alive, there’s no way they’d treat his body the way the Welsh wanted it treated. Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn, and quartered?"

Blue asked, "Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?"

Gansey cast a glance over to Ronan, who was a small, indistinct form by the trees. Adam audibly swallowed a laugh.

"Depends on if Ronan is sober," Gansey answered.

Adam asked, "What is he doing, anyway?"

"Peeing."

"Trust Lynch to deface a place like this five minutes after getting here."

"Deface? Marking his territory."

"He must own more of Virginia than your father, then."

"I don’t think he’s ever used an indoor toilet, now that I consider it."

This all seemed very manly and Aglionby to Blue, this calling of one another by last names and bantering about outdoor urinary habits. It also seemed like it could go on for a long time, so she interrupted, changing the subject back to Glendower. "They’d really go to all this trouble to hide his body?"

Gansey said, "Well, Ned Kelly."

He delivered the nonsensical statement so matter-of-factly that Blue felt abruptly stupid, as if maybe the public-school system really was lacking.

Then Adam said, with a glance toward Blue, "Nobody knows who Ned Kelly is, either, Gansey."

"Really?" Gansey asked, so innocently startled by this that it was clear that Adam had been right before — he hadn’t meant to be condescending. "He was an Australian outlaw. When the British caught him, they did awful things with his body. I think the chief of police used his head as a paperweight for a while. Just think what Glendower’s enemies would do to him! If the Welsh wanted a shot at Glendower being resurrected, they would’ve wanted his body unmolested."

This seemed to remind Gansey of something, because instead of replying to her, he turned to Adam. "I called Malory about that ritual, to see if he’d tried it. He said he didn’t think it could be performed just anywhere on the ley line. He guessed it had to be done on the ‘heart’ of it, where the most energy is. I’m thinking that someplace like that is also where they’d want Glendower."

Adam turned to Blue. "What about your energy?"

The question took her by surprise. "What?"

"You said that you made things louder for other psychics," Adam said. "Is that about energy?"

Blue was absurdly pleased that he remembered, and also absurdly pleased that he’d replied to her instead of Gansey, who was now swatting gnats out of his eyes and waiting for her response.

"Yes," she said. "I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I’m like a walking battery."

"You’re the table everyone wants at Starbucks," Gansey mused as he began to walk again.

Blue blinked. "What?"

Over his shoulder, Gansey said, "Next to the wall plug." He pressed the EMF reader into the side of a tree and observed both objects with great interest.

Adam shook his head at Blue. To Gansey, he said, "I’m saying that she could maybe turn a regular part of the ley line into a doable place for the ritual. Wait, are we going in the woods? What about Helen?"

"It hasn’t been two seconds," Gansey said, although it clearly had been. "That’s an interesting idea about the energy. Though — can your battery get drained? By things other than conversations about prostitution?"

She didn’t dignify this comment with an immediate response. Instead, she thought about how her mother had said there was nothing to fear from the dead, and how Neeve had seemed disbelieving. The church watch had obviously taken something from her; maybe there were worse consequences that she had yet to discover.

"Well, this is interesting," Gansey remarked. He straddled a tiny stream at the very edge of the trees. It was really just water that had bubbled up from an underground source, soaking the grass. Gansey’s attention was focused entirely on the EMF reader he held directly above the water. The meter was pegged.

"Helen," Adam said warningly. Ronan had rejoined them, and both boys looked in the direction of the helicopter.

"I said this is interesting," Gansey repeated.

"And I said Helen."

"Just a couple of yards."

"She’ll be angry."

Gansey’s expression was baleful, and Adam wouldn’t hold out against it. Blue simply stood firmly next to Adam, not putting in her opinion because she was distracted by the _energy_ coming from the woods ahead of them.

"I did tell you," Adam said.

The stream trickled sluggishly out of the woods from between two diamond-barked dogwoods. With Gansey in the lead, they all followed the water into the trees. Immediately, the temperature dropped several degrees. Blue had startled to realize how much insect noise there was in the field until it was replaced by occasional birdsong under the trees. This was a beautiful, old wood, all massive oak and ash trees finding footing among great slabs of cracked stone. Ferns sprang from rocks and verdant moss grew up the sides of the tree trunks. The air itself was scented with green and growing and water. Everything was alive, alive.

She breathed. "This is lovely. The _auras_ …Adam can you describe it for me?"

Adam specified the types of fauna and how the sun shined through the leaves. Gansey and Ronan were curiously muted, something about Ronan’s posture was defensive.

"What are we even looking for?" Adam asked.

Gansey was a bloodhound, the EMF reader leading him along the widening stream. The moving water had become too wide to straddle, and now it ran in a bed of pebbles and sharp fragments of rock and, strangely enough, a few of the oyster shells. "What we’re always looking for."

Adam warned, "Helen is going to hate you."

"She’ll text me if she gets too mad," Gansey said. To demonstrate, he slid his phone out of his pocket. "Oh — there’s no signal."

Given their location in the mountains, the lack of signal was unsurprising, but Gansey stopped short. While the four of them made an uneven circle, he thumbed through the screens on his phone. In his other hand, the EMF reader glowed solid red. His voice sounded a little strange when he asked, "Is anyone else wearing a watch?"

Obviously Blue was not wearing one, and Ronan had only his few knotted leather strands around his arm. Adam lifted his wrist. He wore a cheap-looking watch with a grubby band.

"I am," he said, adding ruefully, "but it doesn’t seem to be working."

Without speaking, Gansey turned the face of his phone to them. It was set to the clock function, and it took Blue a moment to realize that none of the hands were moving. For a long moment the four of them just looked at the three still hands on the phone’s clock face. Blue’s heart marked off every second the clock didn’t.

"Is it —" Adam started, and then stopped. He tried again, "Is it because the power is being affected from the energy of the line?"

Ronan’s voice was cutting. "Affecting your watch? Your windup watch?"

"It’s true," Gansey answered. "My phone’s still on. So’s the reader. It’s only that the time has … I wonder if …"

But there were no answers, and they all knew it.

"I want to go on," Gansey said. "Just a little farther."

He waited to see if they would stop him. No one said anything, but as Gansey set off again, clambering over the top of a slab of stone, Ronan beside him, Adam glanced at Blue. His expression asked, Are you okay?

She was okay, but in the way she’d been okay before the helicopter. It was not that she was scared of flashing lights on the EMF reader or Adam’s watch refusing to work, but she hadn’t gotten out of bed in the morning expecting to encounter a place where possibly time didn’t work.

Hand in hand, Blue and Adam climbed after Gansey. The trees grew even larger, some of them grown together into trunks like castles, turreted and huge. The canopy soared high overhead, rustling and reverent. Everything was green, green, green. Somewhere ahead, water splashed.

For one brief moment, Blue thought she heard music.

"Noah?"

Gansey’s voice sounded forlorn. He’d stopped by a mighty beech tree and now he searched around himself. Catching up to him, Blue realized he’d stopped by the shore of a mountain pool that fed the stream they’d been following. The pool was only a few inches deep and perfectly clear. The water was so transparent that it begged to be touched.

"I thought I heard —" Gansey broke off. His eyes dropped to where Adam held Blue’s hand. Adam’s grip tightened, although she didn’t think he meant for it to.

This was a wordless discussion, too, though she didn’t think either of the boys knew what they were trying to say.

Gansey turned to the pool of water. In his hand, the EMF reader had gone dark. Crouching, he hovered his free hand over the water. His fingers were spread wide, millimeters from the surface. Beneath his hand, the water shifted and darkened, and Blue on the other hand, did not understand why the water had an _aura_.

“Is there something in the water?” Blue asked aloud.

“Yeah, there are hundreds of fish in it,” Adam asked, "How are there fish here?"

The stream they’d followed into the woods was far too shallow for fish, and above them, the pool seemed to be fed by rainfall from higher up the mountain. Fish didn’t come from the sky.

Gansey replied, "I don’t know."

The fish tumbled and coursed over one another, ceaselessly moving, tiny enigmas. Again, Blue thought she heard music, but when she looked at Adam, she thought perhaps it had just been the sound of his breathing.

Gansey looked up to them, and she saw in his face that he loved this place. His bald expression held something new: not the raw delight of finding the ley line or the sly pleasure of teasing Blue. She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness. It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.

Just like that, he was a little bit closer to the Gansey that Blue had _seen_ in the churchyard, and she found she couldn’t bear to look at him.

Instead, she asked Adam to take her to the beech tree Gansey stood beside. Carefully, she was guided over the exposed knots of the beech’s roots, and then she laid her palm on its smooth, gray bark. Like the tree behind her house, this beech’s bark was as cold as winter and oddly comforting.

"Adam." This was Ronan’s voice, and she heard Adam’s footsteps moving cautiously and slowly around the edge of the pool toward it. The sound of snapping branches became softer as he moved farther away.

"I don’t think these fish are real," Gansey said softly.

It was such a ridiculous thing to say that Blue turned to look at him again. He was tipping his hand back and forth as he watched the water.

"I think they’re here because I thought they ought to be here," Gansey said.

Blue replied sarcastically, "Okay, God."

He twisted his hand again; she saw the fish’s forms flash in the water once more. Hesitant, he went on: "At the reading, what was it that the one woman said? With the hair? She said it was about — perception — no, intention."

"Persephone. Intention is for cards," Blue said. "That’s for a reading, for letting someone into your head, to see patterns in the future and the past. Not for fish. How could intention work on a fish? Life isn’t negotiable."

He asked, "What color were the fish when we arrived?"

“Gansey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m blind.”

“Oh, right, uh,” The boy lost his air of elegance as he stuttered, “They’d been black and silver, or at least they had looked it in the reflection. I was watching them and wondering how they’d gotten here and then I remembered that there was a kind of trout that often live in smaller creeks," Gansey said. "Wild brook trout, I think they’re called. I thought, that would make a little more sense. Maybe they were introduced by man, somehow, in this pool, or a pool farther up the stream. That’s what I was thinking. Brook trout are silver on top and red on the bottom."

"Okay," she said.

Gansey’s outstretched hand was very still. "There were no red fish in this pool when we arrived. Now there is a whole school of fish with red on them. Not a little red, but bright red, sunset red, red as a dream. Like they had never been any other color.”

"I don’t understand," Blue said. Something in her ached, though, like she did understand, but couldn’t put words to it, wrap her thoughts around it. She felt like she was a part of a dream this place was having, or it was a part of a dream of hers.

"I don’t, either."

They both turned their head at the same time then, at the sound of a voice from their left.

"Was that Adam?" Blue asked. It seemed strange that she had to ask, but nothing felt very definite.

Again they heard Adam’s voice, more clearly this time. He and Ronan stood on the other side of the pool. Just behind him was an oak tree. A man-sized rotten cavity gaped blackly in its trunk. In the pool at his feet was a reflection of both Adam and the tree, the mirror image colder and more distant than reality.

Adam rubbed his arms fiercely, as if chilled. Ronan stood beside him, looking over his shoulder at something Blue couldn’t see.

"Come here," Adam said. "And stand in there. And tell me if I’m losing my mind." His accent was pronounced, which Blue was beginning to learn meant that he was too bothered to hide it.

Adam peered at the cavity. Like all holes in trees, it looked moist and uneven and black, the fungus in the bark still working away at enlarging the crater. The edges of the entrance were jagged and thin, making the tree’s continued survival seem miraculous.

"Are you okay?" Gansey asked.

"Close your eyes," Adam told him. His arms were crossed, his hands gripping his biceps. The way he was breathing reminded Blue of what it felt like to wake after a nightmare, heart pounding, breath snagging, legs aching from a chase you never really ran. "After you stand in there, I mean."

"Did you go in there?" Gansey asked Ronan, who shook his head.

"He’s the one who pointed it out," Adam said.

Ronan said, flat as a board, "I’m not going in there." When he said it, it sounded like principle instead of cowardice, like his refusal to take a card at the reading.

"I don’t mind," Blue said. "I’ll go. There’s something powerful about this tree."

It was hard for her to imagine being intimidated when surrounded by a tree, no matter how strange the forest around it might be. Stepping into the cavity, she turned so that she faced the outside world. The air inside the cavity smelled damp and close. It was warm, too, and although Blue knew it must be because of the rotting process, it made the tree seem as warm-blooded as her.

In front of her, Adam’s arms were still gripped around himself. What does he think will happen in here?

She closed her unseeing eyes. Almost at once, she could smell rain — not the scent of rain coming, but the living, shifting odor of a storm currently waging, the wide-open scent of a breeze moving through water. Then she became aware that something was touching her face.

When she opened her eyes, she was both in her body and watching it, nowhere near the cavity of the tree. The Blue that was before her stood inches away from a boy with a familiar _aura_. There was a slight stoop to his posture, and it was his fingers that Blue felt on her face. He touched her cheeks with the backs of his fingers.

Tears coursed down the other Blue’s face. Through some strange magic, Blue could feel them on her face as well. She could feel, too, the sick, rising misery she’d felt in the churchyard, the grief that felt bigger than her. The other Blue’s tears seemed endless. One drop slid after another, each following an identical path down her cheeks.

The boy leaned his forehead against Blue’s. She felt the pressure of his skin against hers, and suddenly she could smell mint.

It’ll be okay, Gansey told the other Blue. She could tell that he was afraid. It’ll be okay.

Impossibly, Blue realized that this other Blue was crying because she loved Gansey. And that the reason Gansey touched her like that, his fingers so careful with her, was because he knew that her kiss could kill him. She could feel how badly the other Blue wanted to kiss him, even as she dreaded it. Though she couldn’t understand why, her real, present day memories in the tree cavity were clouded with other false memories of their lips nearly touching, a life this other Blue had already lived.

Okay. I’m ready — Gansey’s voice caught, just a little. Blue, kiss me.

Shaken, Blue opened her eyes for real, and now she felt the cavity around her and smelled the dark, rotten scent of the tree again. Her guts were twisted with the ghostly grief and desire she’d felt in the vision. She was sick and embarrassed, and when she stepped out of the tree, she couldn’t look at Gansey.

"Well?" Gansey asked.

She said, "It’s … something. The power..."

When she didn’t elucidate further, he took her place in the tree.

It had seemed so very real. Was this the future? Was this an alternate future? Was this just a waking dream? She couldn’t imagine falling in love with Gansey, of all people, but in that vision, it had seemed not just plausible, but indisputable.

As Gansey turned inside the cavity, Adam took her arm and dragged her closer. He wasn’t gentle, but Blue didn’t think he meant to be rough. She did startle, though, when he wiped her face with the heel of his other hand; she had been crying real tears.

"I want you to know," Adam whispered furiously, "I would never do that. It wasn’t real. I’d never do that to him."

His fingers were tight on her arm, and she felt him shaking. Blue blinked at Adam, wiping her cheeks dry. It took her a moment to realize that he must have seen something entirely different than she had.

But if she asked him what he had seen, she’d have to tell him what she saw.

Ronan was staring at them, raw, as if he knew what had happened in the tree, even without attempting it himself.

A few feet away in the cavity, Gansey’s head was bowed. He looked like a statue in a church, his hands clasped in front of him. There was something very ancient about him just then, with the tree arched over him and his eyelids rendered colorless in the shadows. He was himself, but he was something else, too — that something that Blue had first _seen_ in him at the boys’ reading, that sense of otherness, of something more, seemed to radiate from that still portrait of Gansey enshrined in the dark tree.

Adam’s face was turned away, and now, now, Blue knew what his expression was: shame. Whatever he had seen in his vision in the hollowed tree, he was certain Gansey was seeing it, too, and he couldn’t bear it.

Gansey’s eyes flicked open.

"What did you see?" Blue asked.

He cocked his head. It was a slow, dreamlike gesture.

Gansey said, "I saw Glendower."


End file.
